This stunning film
which deservedly won the Grand Jury Prize at the
2006 Karlovy Vary Festival and Best Feature Film
at the Denver International Festival, at base
asks the question: Which is more important—hot
sex with a rough, working-class thief, or material
splendor with a rich, gentle, older fellow? But
this is where any similarity between "Beauty
in Trouble" ("Kraska V Nesnazich"
as it's called in Czech), and soap opera, ends.
Jan Hrebejik's film written by Petr Jarchovsky
from the writer and director's story contrasts
culture with boorishness, loyalty with change,
the urban sophistication of the Czech capital
with the rustic beauty of Italy's famed Tuscany.
The acting is superb all around with a lovely
soundtrack featuring some songs taken from the
movie Once. The multi-character story
is rich in human dimension, Hrebejik and Jarchovsky
shucking off all caricatures to show that people
(like you and me) have both positive and negative
sides which can emerge either without apparent
cause or in response to the way we're treated
at any moment.

The writer-director
team's previous feature Up and Down—about
small-time smugglers who discover an abandoned
baby, triggering consequences among a disparate
group of people—selected the challenging
title of this one from a Robert Graves poem which
became the inspiration for a popular Czech song
which goes "Beauty in trouble flees to the
good angel/ On whom she can rely/ To pay her cab-fare,
run a steaming bath,/ Poultice her bruised eye"
and which concludes "Virtue, good angel,
is its own reward."

We're made privy
to the lives of disparate people, as in Up
and Down, folks who are imperfect in different
ways but who deserve our sympathy even as they
choose wrong actions. Marcela Cmolikova (Ana Geislerova),
for example, is fated to love two men for different
reasons, a woman who may live out the rest of
her life as though in conflict with society's
mandate to select and remain loyal to only one.
Her husband, Jarda Smolik (Roman Luknar), is a
thief who steals cars and quickly remakes them
for sale in his garage. Criminality aside, we
understand that he and his family were wiped out
by a flood that hit Prague in 2002 and destroyed
their uninsured home. Jarda and Marcela must provide
a decent life for themselves and their two adorable
kids, Lucina (Michaela Mrvikova) and Kuba (Adam
Misik). In one of the film's many comic scenes,
the children cover their ears as they must do
nightly as their parents have loud, incredible
sex in the adjoining room. When Jarda is caught
and sent to jail, the rest of his family are forced
to move into the cramped home of Marcela's mother,
Zdena (Jana Brejchova) and Zdena's surly second
husband, Richard Hrstka (Jiri Schmitzer), the
latter resenting their presence and making efforts
to get them out. Even here we are invited to find
sympathy for Marcela's stepfather, as he is sick
with diabetes and is eager to get back to his
own sexual life with his wife.

When Marcela meets
Evzen Benes (Josef Abrham), the wealthy owner
of the car whose theft led to her husband's imprisonment,
she is surprised, after a brief courtship, to
be invited to the gentleman's lavish Tuscany digs—an
invitation she accepts despite the large difference
in age in order to keep her family together. This
new courtship is opposed by her mother-in-law
(Emilia Vasaryova), a fervently religious woman
sticking up for the sanctity of marriage.

Class differences
allow for comic scenes, particularly at the dinner
table where in a restaurant overlooking the Vltava
River (which the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana
immortalized in The Moldau) she is introduced
to sushi and makes the mistake committed by Sam
Malone in one episode of Cheers of taking
in a full mouthful of the hot green wasabi condiment.
While Benes, a vintner, relishes a glass of dry
wine, Marcela finds the grape tolerable only when
she combines it with a cola.

Among the cast members who excel we'd have to
include Jiri Schmitzer who, in the role of the
nasty stepfather Richard tells his nephew and
niece the unvarnished truth about their dad after
having some time before rhetorically asked the
teenage girl "Have the boys in school felt
you up yet?" He redeems himself in one heartbreaking
moment. Ultimately the film belongs to Ana Geislerova,
the conflicted Marcela who, upon her husband's
release from prison must decide between a life
of material and psychological security with a
much older man or her less predictable situation
with a sexual dynamo. A fast-paced conclusion
provides an interesting, complex answer.

Photographer Jan
Malir exploits the russet beauty of Tuscany and
the medievalflavor of sections of Prague in a
film that has enough respect for the character
to treat them in all their conflicting dimensions.

Note: The Czechs
produce fine films of their own, obviously, but
Prague, with its Barrandov Studio, is also a favorite
spot for Hollywood film-makers. See my article
in Film
Journal November 2007.

Freestyle Releasing
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+

In these cynical
times which find the U.S. plagued by an endless
war, a weak dollar, rising unemployment and growing
inflation, and some clear divisions between Red
states and Blue states, sophisticated movie audiences
cannot be blamed for wanting to see crowd-pleasing
pictures with an IQ greater than 60. Such an audience
uplift movie launches in August of this year,
is based on a true incident, and may just be the
most nationalistic picture you'll see all year.
Bottle Shock does not relate to the out-of-sight
prices you'll have to pay for wine but to one
of the lesser known celebrations that took place
during our country's bicentennial. (The title
literally refers to the disturbance that could
ruin wine if shipped in airplane cargo sections.)
Just one year after the Vietnam War ended to few
Americans' satisfaction, the U.S. beat the French
in what might at least questionably be called
a sport. Bottle Shock also depicts the
enjoyable socking-it-to-you of a character that
is a virtual caricature of a snob in the style
of Maggie Smith's Lady Hester Random in Franco
Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini.

Sundance-premiered Bottle Shock takes
us back to 1976 when a California wine competed
with the product of vintners from France, the
country considered by oenophiles to have the world's
best grapes and the world's most fabulous food.
The thought that a Napa Valley vintner could stand
up to Frenchwine-makers in France was considered
laughable. But the film Bottle Shock
shows not only how this happened, but the ways
that the great victory might never have taken
place at all.

Randall Miller,
who wrote and directed the film, focuses his story
on a father-son relationship, as well as on the
virtues of the domestic grape. He centers his
character study on the owner of Chateau Montelena,
Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his less ambitious
son, Bo (Chris Pine). Jim was apparently doing
fine as a law partner in a real estate firm when
he decided he wanted a real job. With three loans
from a bank, he struggled to keep his winery afloat,
coming yea close to declaring bankruptcy and crawling
back to the law firm with his tail between his
legs. Meanwhile Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez), far
more ambitious than Bo, works for Jim while he
dreams of starting his own vineyard.

The competition between the U.S. and France in
a sport that requires little more than the ability
to twist the wrist and spit expensive spirits
into silver containers is launched when Steven
Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a British expatriate
in Paris who is friendly with Maurice Cantavale
(Dennis Farina) and stuck with a failing wine
business, decides to promote his career by sponsoring
a contest between the two countries. But what's
a fictionalized true story without a romance?
Enter the hippie-ish, beautiful Sam Fulton (Rachael
Taylor) who signs on with Jim's company as an
intern while taking an understandable interest
in Bo—particularly considering that the
long-haired slacker resembles a younger Brad Pitt.

Director Miller
helms his story like an urbane thriller pitting
people whom the Brit and the French consider "hicks
from the sticks" with their Gallic cousins
across the pond who know quite a bit more about
food and wine—or so they thought. The pace
is slow at first. Miller takes time to develop
his characters, punctuating the uneasy relationship
between the aspiring dad and his lazy son who,
when tension builds between them go into a ring
with gloves and duke it out, each knocking the
other man down several times in round one. Randall
Miller, whose funky Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom
Dancing & Charm School deals with the
search by a recent widower for a dying man's lost
love at a school reunion, cuts back on that movie's
gooey sentiment in favor of a rousing finale,
which may not have the excitement of the recent
Tiger Woods victory but allows us to leave in
a good mood and without having to pick up our
brains at the box office on the way out.

An epilogue notes
that the bottle that beat the French is on display
"at the Smithsonian Institute" (by which
is probably meant the Smithsonian Institution).
The entire movie is exquisitely photographed by
Michael J. Ozier, whose shots of the vineyard
just thirty-seven miles outside San Francisco
is enough to motivate some of us to leave our
cubicles for good and get our jeans dirty in the
countryside. Postscriptum: As though conspiring
the keep the under-17 audience away from pictures
with soul, the MPAA rated this innocent movie
"R" while awarding a PG-13 to the egregiously
vulgar mediocrity, The Love Guru.

John Crowley’s
Boy A is the best narrative feature I’ve
seen at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
If handled correctly (delicately), it could be
(should be) an indie sleeper. Granted the film
does not have the comic uplift of a Juno
or a Little Miss Sunshine but it does
have some important and thought-provoking things
to say about our society and the world we live
in and how we view rehabilitation and redemption.
It also contains an incredibly nuanced, star-making
performance by newcomer Andrew Garfield (seen
last year in the underrated Robert Redford gem
Lions for Lambs).

The film opens
with a 24-year old “boy,” about to
be released from a British juvvy prison, choosing
a name as he sits with his devoted caseworker.
As the film flashes back and forward, we become
privy to his unbelievable story. At the age of
ten, Boy A was involved in committing a heinous
crime and was hauled away. A decade later, the
case is still fresh in the minds of the public
as well as the media so “Jack” must
start afresh and live his life carefully and wary
of revealing who he really is to anyone.

The pic meticulously
takes us into Jack’s daily life as he nervously
makes new friends and even begins dating a co-worker
(an impressive Katie Lyons). Jack is obviously
still a young boy in a man’s body. He is
forever haunted by memories of his past, and worried
about whether he is even deserving of a second
chance.

His caseworker,
Peter (the always extraordinary Peter Mullan),
has been his champion, mentor and protector but
must now deal with his own mess of a son moving
back in.

As the movie moves
towards an inevitable reveal and people’s
predictable reactions, the film keeps true to
it’s bleak but honest themes about the difficulty
of forgiveness and the dangers of the mob (and
media) mentality. Jack may very well be a changed
boy, but will he ever be allowed to live any type
of normal life?

Based on the novel
by Jonathan Trigell, the screenplay (by Mark O’Rowe)
is smartly structured and probes the complexities
of Jack’s impossible situation. We grow
to like him and then we flashback to the murder,
which makes our feelings all the grayer. Along
the periphery the film also examines class and
how that effects the boy’s situation.

Throughout the
film, Garfield holds our attention, showing us
Jack’s fears and newfound joys. We watch
how he learns about the world anew (never having
heard of a dvd), experiments with drugs (a hilarious
scene with him dancing on Ecstasy) and clunkily
stumbles through the awkward moments of falling
in love for the first time. It is a truly remarkable
performance.

Boy A
does omit an important part of Jack’s story
(possibly deliberately). We are never shown any
moments from his time in prison. I would have
loved a glimpse of his world and what it was like
to be inside his head during some of the defining
period of adolescence. But then that’s what
a really good film does. It makes us want more.

The Weinstein Company
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: B

At times Boy
A looks more like a propaganda piece for
penal reform, or more specifically, a plea that
society understand that when prisoners are released,
they've paid their debt. Society does appear at
first to honor this idea when a fellow commits
a heinous crime at the age of ten, is incarcerated
in a juvenile facility for fourteen years, is
given a new identity, apartment, job and a caring
social worker who seems to have only one client.
What's more, he appreciates what he's getting,
is well-liked on a job he's overjoyed to have—one
which comes with an outgoing girlfriend. Yet when
"society" finds out that he was in jail
not for stealing cars for joyrides but for murder,
albeit far below the age of maturity, the people
who heretofore accepted him think nothing of casting
him out. His big mistake was to return to a Manchester
nabe rather than to disappear in London, but that's
another story.

Perhaps Boy
A will deserve a rating better than "B"
from Brit-crix. The biggest problem in this superbly
acted downer is the dialogue, which is not as
bad as what we put up with in Trainspotting
(don't expect to understand Scottish if you're
an all-American, but at least that pic had English
subtitles—which Boy A could most
decidedly use). One wonders why Peter Mullan,
who plays a social worker who presumably has had
a college education, must talk with a thick brogue,
though we accept this as cinema verite from the
mouth of his favorite client.

John Crowley's
film, adapted by Mark O'Rowe from Jonathan Trigell's
novel, is nicely edited by Lucia Zucchetti, who
takes us seamlessly from the present to the protagonist's
past at appropriate moments. Andrew Garfield,
who played student Todd Hayes in Lions for
Lambs, anchors the story in a career-making
performance as Jack Burridge, a 24-year-old released
from juvenile custody after fourteen years for
a senseless murder he helped commit at the age
of ten. He's most fortunate to be under the wing
of a Terry (Peter Mullan) social worker who if
anything is too dedicated to his job, a seriousness
that ultimately proves disastrous to his client.
Jack, whose real name is Eric Wilson, enjoys his
job with a delivery company, a gig that affords
him not only friendly co-workers but also girlfriend,
Michelle (Katie Lyons) who is immediately attracted
to the lad: From time to time, photographer Rob
Hardy shows us that Jack is tormented by the past
by allowing us to eavesdrop on his (Alfie Owen's)
hanging out with the wrong company, namely Philip
Craig (Taylor Doherty). His current fortune will
prove all too good to be lasting.

Aside from its
execution as a downbeat story, the real find is
Andrew Garfield who evokes the shyness of a guy
whose best years have been ruined in a prison
cell, where in one scene he is tortured by fellow
convicts. Katie Lyons as girlfriend Michelle convincingly
brings the young man out of his shell while his
caseworker, who is in loco parentis, provides
more adult support. Peter Mullan, whose bio includes
the starring role of Joe Kavanagh in the working-class
study My Name is Joe, plays the sort
of guy we'd all want as a dad—even if his
own son takes exception.

"The rich
are very different from you and me," said
F. Scott Fitzgerald, to which we can add by contrast
that emotions remain the same in every century,
across whole demographic strains. Evelyn Waugh's
masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, illustrates
this point, the film adaptation by Julian Jarrold
flawlessly illustrating the way a wealthy, aristocratic
British family during the decades preceding World
War II spend their days, seeking pleasure yet
restrained by religious influences. What the viewer
must remember, though, is that the restraints
of the Catholic faith, to which Waugh converted,
must not be looked upon as a negative. The major
theme of the novel is that Divine Grace enters
into the lives of people when they open themselves
up to the Deity no matter how late in life the
conversion, a process sometimes called being "born
again."

The Evelyn Waugh
novel was given an eleven-episode treatment on
TV in 1981 under the direction of Charles Sturridge
and Michael Lindsay-Hogg with Jeremy Irons and
Anthony Andrews assuming the roles of the two
principal characters. Compressing the novel (now
available for just over ten bucks at Amazon) into
just over two hours required Julian Jarrold to
omit several minor characters from the tapestry,
concentrating particularly on the relationship
between young Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode, Match
Point and The Lookout) and Sebastian
Marchmain (Ben Whishaw, Perfume: The Story
of a Murderer), a friendship that began when
each entered Oxford University.

The current film
gets the treatment we've come to associate with
Merchant-Ivory productions, punctuating the privileges
of the very rich during the decades that the aristocracy
was to decline in Great Britain. Without sentimentality
or preaching, Brideshead Revisited, adapted
from the novel by Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones
Diary) and Jeremy Brock (The Last King
of Scotland), evokes the principal motifs:
The importance of Catholicism; nostalgia for the
age of English nobility; and the passionate, though
platonic, relationship between Charles Ryder and
Sebastian Flyte.

The story opens
on Charles Ryder, a British officer during World
War II who moves his men to a castle known as
Brideshead. He wistfully recounts his days among
the Marchmain family inhabiting what Charles considers
the most beautiful home he had ever seen. While
now a middle-aged, somewhat disillusioned fellow,
he was just a naïve freshman at Oxford when
he is introduced by Sebastian to an intimidating
crowd of students. His friendship with Sebastian
leads the latter's family to invite Charles to
spend the summer, whereupon he slowly develops
an affection for his friend's sister, Julia Flyte
(Hayley Atwell, Cassandra's Dream). Though
an atheist (an agnostic in the novel), he gains
the trust of Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), who
takes her Catholicism seriously, though her husband,
Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) has moved to Venice
with another woman, Cara (Greta Scacchi) Charles's
atheism, however, makes him a poor match for Julia,
who has been ordered by Lady Marchmain to marry
a rich, boorish, Canadian businessman. Sebastian,
an alcoholic who will eventually move far from
his home to get away from his devout mother who
controls him through guilt, proves to be a handful
for both his family and Charles. As Charles's
bond with Julia becomes firmer, we in the audience
question the man's motives. Is he in love, or
is he (despite his newly acquired fame as a painter)
all too hungry for the trapping of aristocracy?

Filmed by Jess
Hall to evoke the incredible wealth and privileges
of the 20th century aristocracy in Britain, Brideshead
Revisited is both a compelling piece of cinematography
and a slow, painstaking look at the diverse fortunes
of the anointed. As one non-believer after another—including
to some extent Sebastian but more directly Sebastian's
father, and even Charles—becomes "born
again"—their dissolute lives become
more constructive in ways that should be seen
rather than revealed in a review. Brideshead
Revisited is smart, handsome film-making
without the usual summer panoply of special effects
and computer generative industry, a picture graced
by solid acting and a rich empathy with people
who find themselves through religion rather than
wealth.

A film adaptation
of a literary classic is difficult at the best
of times. The situation is only complicated when
said classic has already been televised in an
epic, 13-hour mini-series starring a gaggle of
Britain's literary talents, the prospect becomes
even more daunting. Fortunately, director Julian
Jarrolds has had the testicular fortitude to attempt
a new version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead
Revisited, resulting in a compelling and
innovative take on one of Britain's
finest and most nuanced pieces of literature.

Needless to say, when condensing a 30-page book
Page book (or an 11
hour miniseries) into a 2-hour, much will be lost
in translation. Certain plot points are excised,
several characters are reduced in significance,
but this is all in aid of Jarrolds' intent, which
is to shift the main focus of the story toward
the bizarre love triangle between seductively
charming siblings Julia (Hayley Atwell) and
Sebastian (I'm Not There's Ben Whishaw)
and their lesser-born, introspective friend Charles
Ryder (played by Matthew Goode; Goode strongly
resembles Jeremy Irons, who originated the role
in the miniseries.)

Obviously, this approach loses some of the epic
sweep and deeper political and philosophical concerns
of Waugh's vision. The book and original adaptation
can be viewed as a Canaletto canvas, with the
characters carefully and distantly through the
grand landscapes of Oxford, Venice, and the titular
stately homes, their emotions carefully (if barely)
in check. Jarrolds, on the other hand, has filmed
Brideshead as a Caravaggio, where the rich settings
are a backdrop for the desperate passionate grappling
and anguish of lovers trapped in murky waters.

This approach is aided immensely by powerful performances
by the three
leads. Atwell is positively dazzling as Julia,
a woman torn between a nature of vitality and
passion tempered by a sense of duty and devout
Catholic faith. As Sebastian, the outwardly vivacious
but deeply fragile and insecure gadabout, Whishaw
balances impish charm with heartbreaking pain
and fragility. Goode, the most enigmatic of the
trio, is something of an unsteady chameleon, but
with a great deal of emotion and compassion.

While this trio works beautifully together, the
standout performance in Brideshead is
Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Sebastian and
Julia's mother. Almost un recognizable in grey
set curls, Thompson doesn't shy away from the
staunch domineering, aspects of Marchmain's character,
but also brings moment of exquisite vulnerability
and uncertainty that makes her character much
more human.

With this new focus,
some of Waugh's intent falls by the wayside. There's
much mention of the film of the Marchmain-Flytes
being Catholic, but little demonstration of how
their faith guides their actions. Nevertheless,
this new angle on Waugh's complex story is teeming
over with romantic, lustful and tender, and the
social formalities that labor in vain to constrain
them. Gloriously set and
sumptuously costumes, it's a drama of emotion
and passion not to be
missed.

Christopher Nolan’s
The Dark Knight is easily the best action
film to be released so far this summer. I almost
hesitate to label it an action film because it
is smart, clever, dark and disturbing. Audiences
will probably not leave theatres feeling good
about their fellow man. They may leave pondering
certain moral and ethical issues the film brings
up (and, mercifully, does not necessarily answer)
and that is reason enough to celebrate!

Nolan, who helmed
the terrific Batman Begins, along with
his writer/brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer,
probe the gray and dig deep down into the grim
in order to hypothesize about the point where
hero becomes villain. Can anyone hold onto his
own code of ethics in a fickle and rush-to-judgment
society? Does power always corrupt? Why do heroes
matter so much to us? And if we knew the real
truth about those we are led to believe are models
of propriety, would we ever be able to believe
in anyone or anything?

Heavy? Sure. And
thank God for that!

The plot is deliberately
confusing and repeat viewings are encouraged.
Suffice to say that our caped crusader has his
work cut out for him this time around. The mob,
led by a smarmy Eric Roberts, is getting away
with murder and a new D.A.; Harvey Dent (the terrific
Aaron Eckhart) is on the scene to battle crime
in Gotham City. His girlfriend is Bruce Wayne’s
former squeeze, Rachel Dawes (a perfectly cast
Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes).

Batman is more
brooding and angst-ridden than usual and Christian
Bale has pain and suffering to spare. He’s
at a moral crossroads and the arrival of a new
and unpredictable threat tosses him into a confounding
tailspin. From American Psycho onward,
Bale proves he is one of the best and most fascinating
actors working today.

“The which
doesn’t kill you, makes you stranger.”
The Joker.

The threat arrives
in the form of the initially bumbling Joker (Heath
Ledger). But don’t let his first few scenes
fool you--this villain is vile and wicked. With
his mussy, stringy hair, repulsive yet beguiling
(white) face and badly painted smile to accentuate
his scars, this card (pun intended) believes in
chaos and anarchy. His evil cannot be predicted,
reasoned or controlled because he doesn’t
want anything other than to cause mayhem, destroy
and prove the malignant nature of man. As Michael
Caine’s wise Alfred puts it: “Some
men just want to watch the world burn.”
He doesn’t even want Batman dead. Quite
the contrary, he stares at him and freakily states,
“You complete me.”

If the Joker’s
reasons are buried in childhood trauma or abuse
we are never given his real story and Ledger’s
performance is the better for it. As a matter
of creepy fact, the Joker actually provides a
few horrific childhood scenarios, but we soon
realize that we can’t ever trust what he
says; he’s simply having a macabre laugh
at his victim’s expense, after all, he is
a sadistic fuck. He’s also a masochist.
It’s a mesmerizing, messy portrait, loaded
with mad nuances.

There has been
much posthumous Oscar speculation among critics,
prognosticators and Hollywoodites regarding Ledger’s
performance--and with good reason. It’s
an all-immersive, vanity-free portrayal and a
fitting swan song to a promising career cut tragically
short. Ledger should have won his gold dude for
Brokeback Mountain, so it would not be
surprising if his genius turn here gets him the
prize.

The look of the
film is stunning and spectacularly gloomy. All
tech credits are extraordinary.

The Dark Knight
proves a superhero film can be more than a cacophonous,
pyrotechnic, effects-driven video game. It can
have non-stop action, amazing effects and still
have an untidy, topsy-turvy plot and performances
that strive to be more than simply good and actually
achieve a kind of transcendence.

Heath Ledger in The
Dark Knight

Christopher
Nolan’sThe Dark Knight
Opens Friday, July 18, 2008

Written By: Jonathan Nolan; Christopher Nolan;
Story by Christopher Nolan; David S. Goyer from
characters in DC Comics. Batman created by Bob
Kane.

It's difficult
to criticize a movie in which a fellow who is
considered "a White Knight," "the
best of us," goes by the first name "Harvey"—a
District Attorney who has locked up half of Gotham
(filmed by Wally Pfister in Chicago). The picture
is a mixed bag, one that might be summarized by
part of a terrific commercial that appeared years
back before trailers, in which one moviegoer is
pondering whether to attend a film that's "visually
arresting but ultimately pointless." Not
that The Dark Knight is pointless, but
on the other hand comes across as though it were
a series of trailers. Christopher Nolan who directs
from a script he co-write with his brother Jonathan
Nolan, appears to make a few moral points: that
even the best of us can turn rotten when pursuing
vengeance; that a caped crusader can be disliked
by much of the city he protects because he is
blamed indirectly for quite a few murders; that
you can't negotiate with a terrorist, because
(at least in this case), the demon has no interest
in money or power but only in fomenting as much
chaos as he can.

The Dark Knight
is graced by an astonishing performance from
Heath Ledger as The Joker, one scary fella who
covers up scars he received from his knife-wielding
dad with makeup that gives him a face covered
with white paint while leaving lips to be decked
out in dark red. If an Oscar can be awarded posthumously,
Mr. Ledger should be guaranteed at least a nomination
for portraying what will probably be this year's
most exciting portrayal of a villain. The movie
comes to life whenever he is on the screen, but
becomes pedestrian whenever Christian Bale, so
fearsome and authentic as Patrick Bateman in American
Psycho, enters the screen. Bale is a dull
Bruce Wayne and a less than awesome hero.

There are two fundamentally
distinct ways to judge the quality of this plot.
One group of moviegoers and critics are going
to find gems in its complexity, stating even that
the film deserves multiple viewings (at two and
one-half hours a pop) to figure out who's who
and what's what. Others will take an opposite
approach, holding that the story is so incoherent,
one might as well throw up his hands and consider
the film of value only because of some awesome
visual delights. I'll have to take that latter
point of view. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,
or for that matter Christopher Nolan's Memento,
have trajectories which become clear by the second
or third viewing. The Dark Knight, by
contrast, throws together a pot pourri of criminals
and crime fighters that are nearly impossible
to sort out or make even comic-book sense of.
Additional screenings are likely to be fruitless.

Gotham is portrayed
as a city rife with police corruption, organized
crime, and one weird, psychopathic killer who
seems motivated to get revenge against the father
who scarred him for life. He takes out his anger
on an assortment of citizens. His chief nemesis
is the incorruptible (at least for a while) District
Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), but The
Joker is not eager to kill Batman. He considers
the caped crusader someone who "completes"
him, someone to play with to prove his skills
to the entire city. The Joker is an expert at
demolition: in one scene, he blows up a hospital
and buildings surrounding it, walking away laughing
to himself. When he gets the drop on an individual,
he licks his lips, slowly, calmly explaining to
his victims why he has become the psycho he is.
Every actor wants to play the bad guy, Heath Ledger
providing a textbook example--as the D.A., Bruce
Wayne, and Batman are dishwater-dull by contrast
(until one of them shows his dark side, thereby
helping to prove the maxim). The film can be interpreted
as an indictment of American foreign policy. In
one scene, a scientist sets up a system of wiretapping
that will allow Batman to spy on millions of Chicago's
citizens. In another, Batman mercilessly delivers
a beating to a prisoner, hoping to get information
about a kidnap victim's whereabouts.

There are faux
Batmans, bank robbers, Hong Kong businessmen,
all thrown into the mix helter-skelter along with
the usual array of car crashes, truck somersaults,
and a terrific-looking Batpod. There's even a
romantic triangle as Bruce Wayne's former squeeze,
Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), has shifted her loyalties
to the district attorney—an unusual switch
considering that she once had the attention of
a billionaire playboy. Gary Oldman shows up regularly
with a restrained performance as a detective about
to become the city's police commissioner, Morgan
Freeman as a scientist, Michael Caine as Bruce
Wayne's lifelong butler Alfred.

If you thrill to
visual mayhem, try to see the picture on the IMAX
screen, which delivers the goods particularly
when Batman descends quickly from skyscrapers
or spreads out his bat-wings to fly across buildings.
By now, though, the usual visual thrills have
become a common-enough staple in blockbusters.
Ditto the thumping soundtracks, in this case provided
by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. What's
missing is a solid, coherent story, one that pares
down the numbers of subplots and subplots to subplots.

Samuel Goldwyn
Films
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-8

In his four-stanza
poem, Sailing to Byzantium—which
includes a verse to "a dying animal,"
also the title of a recent novella by Philip Roth—William
Butler Yeats describes both about the journey
taken by the speaker's soul around the time of
death and the process by which the artist transcends
his own mortality. Philip Roth, whose novella
forms the basis of film Elegy, is obsessed
with age, with mortality, and with the fading
of his own passions—all of which come across
in this remarkable movie by the Spanish director,
Isabel Coixet. Without passing judgment on a man
who might be roundly condemned by feminists today,
Coixet directs from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer,
one which closely follows the trajectory of Roth's
book. Prestige films from literary sources are
a rare breed today: Elegy joins such
summer-released films as Julian Jarrold's Brideshead
Revisited as must-sees on any sophisticated
moviegoer's itinerary.

"That is no
country for old men…An aged man is but a
paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/
Soul clap its hands and sing…" So goes
some verses from Yeats's poem, and so evolves
the character David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a charismatic
professor of literary criticism who uses his prestige
at a New York university (one that looks like
Columbia though the filming took place in Vancouver)
to bed several women three or four decades his
junior. He keeps his distance emotionally from
the women—something his best friend, squash
partner and Pulitzer-prize-winning poet George
(Dennis Hopper) urges him to do. Kepesh is floored
by the beauty of a Cuban-born student, Consuela
Castillo (Penelope Cruz); he senses that she must
be wooed before being won just like women in the
1950's, he correctly notes in discussing America's
Puritan heritage on the air. Kepesh is fascinated
by her beautiful breasts—which Ms Cruz generously
exhibits for us in the audience—so much
so that contrary to feminist beliefs today, Consuela
lauds him for his attentions therein. "Nobody
else loves my body as you do," she states
with love in her eyes. While Kepesh sets up a
sexual liaison with the young student, he maintains
a long-term, commitment-free affair with an older
woman, Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), a sophisticated
businesswoman in her late forties who believes
that she is his only bed partner.

Philip Roth's obsession
with age and decline, punctuated by at least one
death in the story, evokes the title Elegy,
a mournful poem or lament for the dead. As an
older man who ponders his age almost daily, he
is certain that a youthful charmer will steal
his great love away. Jealousy demands that she
remain in touch with him regularly. "Stop
worrying about growing old," his friend George
advises, knowing that his counsel will not be
followed, "And think about growing up."
(Lots of us men should have such problems with
immaturity.)

Aside from its
theme of mortality and decline, Elegy
concerns itself with the impact on others of pure
physical beauty. David, by way of illustration,
simply cannot see beyond Consuela's body to understand
that this woman wants a man who can offer her
a future, and that David would be the one she
would choose. David's womanizing has an effect
on his son, Kenny Kepesh (Peter Sarsgaard), a
doctor who cannot forgive his dad's marital abandonment
and therefore remains loyal to his own wife though
he has fallen in love with another. In the film's
final scene, there has been an about face, one
which demonstrates Consuela's spirit to David
for the first time.

Jan Claude Larrieu
photographs the proceedings in Vancouver, which
stands in for New York, heightening director Coixet's
emphasis on the pain that complements the human
condition as well as its physical pleasures. The
music, both in the background and as pieces played
by David on the piano, are the antithesis of summer-movie
soundtracks—featuring works from Bach's
"Adagio from Concerto in D Minor" through
Vivaldi's "Vendro Con Mio Diletto" from
"Giutino" but not ignoring pop favorites
like Al Lerner's "Loneliness Ends with Love."
Acting is magnificent all-around with Dennis Hopper
supplying much of the humor as the principal's
sexual and spiritual adviser, Ben Kingsley's piercing
job particularly in a concluding scene that finds
him awash in tears, and Penelope Cruz's deft portrayal
as a woman of spectacular beauty, charm, and ultimate
vulnerability.

Don’t let the fact
that Frozen River won the dramatic grand
prize at Sundance fool you. Director Courtney
Hunt’s low-budget indie about two poor mothers
– one white, one Native American –
who risk their lives smuggling illegal immigrants
across the Frozen St. Lawrence river is not just
a complex, well-acted, authentically naturalistic
slice of forgotten lives; it is also a tightly
plotted, gripping thriller.

Frozen River tells the story of Ray Eddy
(Melissa Leo), a poor upstate New York mother
who lives in an insulation-free trailer with her
fifteen and five-year-old sons. When her gambling
addict husband relapses a week before Christmas
and runs off with the cash for the doublewide
of her dreams, leaving Ray and the kids (Charlie
McDermot and James Reilly) to live on popcorn
and Tang, Ray goes looking for him. Nobody’s
victim, she brings along a revolver, which she
immediately uses to shoot a hole in the side of
the camper where she finds husband’s car.
The camper is on the Mohawk reservation that straddles
an unpatrolled section of the US-Canadian border,
and in it is Lila Littlewolf (Missy Upham), a
luckless smuggler who is trying to get her own
baby son back from her late husband’s mother,
who, she says, “stole him.”

From this inauspicious meeting, the partnership
is born. For a while, the river holds and the
money flows. But complications ensue. These involve,
in no particular order: deep-seated racial tensions,
the law, a finicky blowtorch, gunshots outside
a strip club, looming blindness, ingrained bitterness,
single motherhood, the suffocating realities of
poverty, the (at best) indifference of nature,
possible complicity in a variety of heinous crimes
(including, Ray suspects, of terrorism) and both
metaphorical and literal thin ice. Along the way,
the women may even participate in an authentic
Christmas miracle involving a pair of unwanted
travelers and an infant that somehow doesn’t
feel the least bit cheesy.

The leads
are so strong that it is difficult to imagine
other actresses in the roles. Leo (best known
for the 90’s TV series Homicide: Life
on the Street) anchors the movie with a tough,
vanity-free performance as a woman with whom life
has not been gentle, but who retains a core of
decency. Upham’s open face conveys worlds
of emotion beneath a deep mistrust not only of
white people and their world, but of almost everyone
around her. The bond they share as single mothers
fighting for their broken families is unspoken
but palpable and one of the films biggest strengths.

The other main players deliver as well: in an
especially well written role, McDermot expertly
navigates between the poles of teenage selfishness
and maturity, pettiness and generosity. And old
pros Michael O’Keefe as the local sheriff
and Mark Boone Junior as a thoroughly scummy human
trafficker give strong support.

Hunt’s writing is crisp and unsentimental,
and her pacing is unusually taut for a low-budget
indie. Cinematographer Reed Morano shoots the
bleak Plattsville, NY location in all its gray
oppressiveness and natural grandeur, and the score
(several composers are credited) is haunting,
further contributing to the thriller-like atmosphere.
That it was done on the cheap in less than a month
in sub-zero temperatures makes the accomplishment
all the more impressive.

But don’t take my word for it. Sundance
jury president Quinten Tarantino, a guy who knows
a little something about provoking a reaction
from an audience, said the film “put my
heart in a vice and didn’t let go.”

People under the
age of twenty-five probably can't believe that
on the TV series Get Smart that began
in 1965, a secret agent's gadget consisting of
a shoe with a wireless phone inside was considered
a far-out, James-Bond style toy. Remember that
as recently as then, a telephone in your car was
considered an expensive luxury: few could have
conceived that more Americans would own cells
today than not. In adapting the Get Smart
concept for a big-screen movie, director Peter
Segal (The Longest Yard, Naked Gun
33-1/3) pays homage to the old episodes created
by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry which starred Don
Adams and Barbara Feldon while simultaneously
updating the story to throw in some more gadgets.
At the same time, though, Barbara Feldon in the
role of Agent 99 for 131 episodes was already
a liberated woman who did not defer to Adams's
Maxwell Smart (138 episodes). In a sense, then,
the small-screen and multiplex versions are not
dissimilar.

Get Smart
has a lot of action shots filmed by Dean Semler—a
low-flying propeller plane threatened with breakup;
a car about to collide with a train; some skydiving
with and without parachutes; explosions within
a bakery; car chases; people chases; gunplay;
all punctuated by Trevor Rabin's pulsating music
with breakneck speed encouraged by editor Richard
Pearson. But comedy is scripters' Tom J. Astle
and Matt Ember's primary consideration, the laughs
coming out of the situations that the agents of
CONTROL find themselves in, while verbal wit is
virtually nonexistent. In fact there is just one
quip worthy of the term in the entire one hundred
ten minutes of the movie, that involving an essay
on existentialism that Maxwell Smart has written
on an exam that he takes for a hoped-for promotion
in the agency.

Steve Carrel anchors
the show as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart, who will
turn out to confirm the Peter Principle: "In
a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his
level of incompetence." An expert at analysis,
he picks up chatter of enemies of the U.S., delivering
valuable information to the staff of the clandestine
agency. When he passes an exam that should have
promoted him to agent, the bureau chief (Alan
Arkin) wants to keep him doing what he has been
doing, though circumstances change. He becomes
a field operative, Agent 86, is teamed up with
Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), and is no longer responsible
for preparing dull reports for Agent 23 (Dwayne
Johnson). The job is to uncover nefarious activities
by the head of KAOS, Siegfried (Terence Stamp),
suspected of considering sabotage somewhere in
the U.S.

The laughs are
designed around essentially a series of Saturday
Night Live skits involving the relationship
of Agent 86 and Agent 99, with Anne Hathaway's
character resenting a man who is brand new to
the job and could compromise her safety. After
all, she proves herself several times during the
story by being able to run with high heels, kick,
punch and shoot like the best of the men. Inevitable
bickering between the two will give way to sentiment,
with Agent 86 finding herself sufficiently attached
to her partner that she will presuambly crumble
if he is hurt or killed.

As in the James
Bond series, gadgets are the co-stars: 86 and
99 appear competitive even in showing off what
they're carrying, the paraphernalia including
the shoe phone, a pocket smokescreen, a small
flamethrower, a hook, a blowgun; while sports
cars formerly seen in the TV series strut their
stuff—the Opel GT, the Karmann Ghia, the
Sunbeam Tiger. James Caan turns up as our country's
chief executive, a man who is not identified but
who cannot pronounce "nuclear" and who
falls asleep during a concert of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony.

Not surprisingly,
Steve Carrel is the man to watch, his Agent 99
being out of his depth in the field, but unlike
The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau,
sensitive enough to be taken aback by criticism.
Bond wannabees have included Mike Myers's Austin
Powers, Dean Dujardin's Oss 117, and in real life
quite a few people in Britain who want to join
M16 thinking that they will really be license
to kill. There is only one James Bond: his comic
imitators on the screen are pale by comparison.

Claude Chabrol’s
new film, A Girl Cut in Two (La fille
coupee en deux), is a very French film based
on an American story. Girl retells the
story of the “Trial of the Century”
– the 1906 murder of architect Stanford
White by wealthy socialite Henry K. Thaw. Thaw
had married a beautiful showgirl named Evelyn
Nesbitt, who had formerly been White’s mistress.
Overcome by jealousy of the older man’s
supposed sexual prowess, Thaw shot White at a
fete in the White-designed Madison Square Garden.
Thaw was charged with first degree murder, but
the jury decided he was insane. This story has
been retold many times, most famously in author
E. L. Doctorow 1975 novel, Ragtime.

French beauty Ludivine
Sagnier (of Swimming Pool fame) plays
the Evelyn Nesbitt part in A Girl Cut in Two,
Gabrielle Aurore Deneige, the weather girl of
a Parisian news station. Gabrielle meets two men
simultaneously, famous author Charles Saint-Denis
(played by François Berléand) and
wealthy dilettante Paul André Claude Gaudens
(played by Benoît Magimel). Rather counter-intuitively,
Gabrielle falls madly in love with the older happily-married
Saint-Denis. She is quite nonplussed by the wealthy,
attractive, younger and borderline-crazy Paul.

Gabrielle and St.
Denis begin a passionate love affair, one where
he introduces her to the dark side of sex, the
world of decadent sex acts and clubs. There is
one much talked about scene where Gabrielle crawls
to St. Denis while she is adorned only with huge
peacock feathers that are supposedly stuck in
her rear. But decadency aside, St. Denis soon
hungers for something different and rejects the
now desolate Gabrielle.

Gabrielle then
does the besotted Paul a big favor and marries
him, much to the disapproval of his mother, the
haughty Geneviève Gaudens (played by Caroline
Silhol). But as in the Nesbitt/White/Thaw triangle,
the husband is never able to forget the image
of his now wife in the arms of his rival, and
he repeatedly forces her to confess her past indiscretions,
fueling his hatred of St. Denis. And this hatred
leads to death, just like it did in the original
story.

All the performances
in the film are first rate. The film is also very
beautiful, beautifully shot and beautifully cast.
The film is a talker like most French films. People
analyze their emotions in depth. Class issues
are plumbed; Paul’s jealous rage is fueled
in part by his belief that a wealthy young man
like himself should never have the problem of
attracting and keeping a beautiful wife in the
first place. And then there is the world of the
intelligentsia versus the world of the bourgeois.
All in all, A Girl Cut in Two is very
French – sophisticated and urbane. If you
have never watched French films, Girl
would be a perfect place to start. You will never
understand quite why the French find us so unrefined
until you have a chance to visit their jaded and
sophisticated world.

The title makes
it sound as though this filim is about a magician
who messes up big time with his female partner.
As you can imagine, though, the name is allegorical—but
only partly, as you'll note from the final scene
which serves as epilogue. In Girl, one
of France's most celebrated regisseurs, Claude
Chabrol, directs and teams up with co-writer Cecile
Maistre to turn out a heavy-handed, talky, but
never dull tale of a gullible young French woman
who is torn between the demands for affection
of the two men in her life. It's no wonder that
ménage-a-trois is a term invented by the
French, though in this film, the two men in a
woman's life do not occupy the latter's bed at
the same time. Maybe that's the problem: when
the men meet at various posh functions, the hostility
can be cut with a magician's buzzsaw. Nothing
good can come of this complex situation in a tale
populated by an ensemble of extras, all of whom
suggest that what Chabrol is up to is the creation
of a comedy of manners: a culture war between
old money, which is not so old since it represents
a fortune inherited by a young, obnoxious man
who acknowledges that he is used to getting what
he wants; and new money, which comes to a best-selling
writer accustomed to rave reviews.

Two of Chabrol's
favorite themes are explored: his displeasure
with bourgeois values; and the willingness of
some to kill as proof of love.

While it may appear
easy for a beautiful young woman to accept a proposal
of marriage from the scion of a pharmaceutical
fortune, or to accept the attentions and affections
of a major celebrity, A Girl Cut in Two
(La fille coupee en deux in its original
title) offers some cautionary counsel. That handsome
multi-millionaire may have dangerous traces of
schizophrenia. The best-selling author has a wife
who has already treats him well, making him highly
unlikely to split and run away with the young
charmer.

Benoit Magimel
performs in the role of Paul Andre Claude Gaudens,
a brash, seemingly confident, arrogant lad with
a map of blond hair, an eye for the fair sex,
and vulnerabilities that are cloaked by his devil-may-care
attitude. When he spots Gabrielle-Aurore Deneige
(Ludivine Sagnier), it's love at first sight.
He virtually proposes on the day he meets her.
Gabrielle works as a TV weather-girl on her way
up, a weather-girl who looks as though she could
still play Tinker-Bell, a role Ms Sagnier once
tackled. Complicating the budding romance, novelist
Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand), who is
twice Gabrielle's age, falls for her as well.
The big surprise is that she reciprocates the
older man's affections while stringing along the
young playboy. The rivalry of the two men, neither
likable, for the carnal and emotional attentions
of the young maiden, leads to the melodramatic
strain that takes over during the final episodes
of the film.

A possible motivation
for young Paul's nuttiness and feelings of guilt
are explained by his snooty mother, Genevieve
Gaudens (Caroline Sihol) when a flashback would
have been more dramatic. French cinema, in fact,
is famous (or notorious) for its emphasis on talk,
to the exclusion, sometimes, of bold action.
La fille coupee en deux is sometimes suffocating
in its verbosity, but that's part of Chabrol's
point. If you're a "commoner" with the
chance to work your way into a moneyed family,
be prepared to suffer endless evenings and weekends
in the company of stuffed-shirts who wax poetic
about the quality of the served brandy. You're
marrying a clan, not must a man. The story is
peopled with unlikable, pretentious characters,
whose very pretences are illustrated by the worlds
of television and books—which are ostensibly
and proudly the essences of illusion.

Even if
you were not around for Hunter Thompson’s
glory days, the days when he rode the bus/planes
to cover the Presidential campaigns of Senator
George McGovern and President Jimmy Carter for
Rolling Stone, you might have become
enchanted with Thompson when you saw the film
version of Fear and Loathingin Las
Vegas (starring a whacked out Johnny Depp
as Thompson). And you would have become enchanted
as in “That was one funny fucked-up guy.
I think I would have liked him.”

Here is a quote
from the press release for Alex Gibney's (of Academy
Award winning Taxi to the Dark Side fame)
new documentary film Gonzo: “Gonzo
is a three-dimensional portrait with a focus on
Thompson's work, whose legendary status is due
as much to his scintillating writing as his outrageous
antics. A die-hard member of the NRA, Thompson
was also a coke-snorting, whiskey-swilling, acid-eating
fiend. While his pen dripped with venom for crooked
politicians, he surprised nervous visitors with
the courtly manners and soft-spoken delivery of
a Southern gentleman. Careening out of control
in his personal life, Thompson also maintained
a steel-eyed conviction about righting wrongs.
Today, in a time when “spin” has replaced
the search for deeper meaning, Thompson remains
an iconic crusader for truth, justice and a fiercely
idealistic American way.”

Thompson created
a creative form of interpretive journalism which
he called Gonzo Journalism. He wrote spoofy coverage
stating things like Senator Ed Muskie was under
the influence of a psychoactive drug, Ibogaine.
He could also be mega goofy, acting for home movies
while wearing a Richard Nixon masks and swimming
in his pool. No one was immune from his scathing
comedic coverage, but it was never just name calling
- Thompson was clever; his words are a delight
to read. But underneath the humor is a lot of
anger, anger about the state of affairs in this
our United States of America. And the anger that
Hunter felt resonates today; we are still surrounded
by reaming buckets of hypocrisy.

Director Alex Gibney
obviously had a hell-of-a-time making Gonzo.
He interviewed George McGovern, Jimmy Carter AND
Pat Buchanan. He also incorporated Hunter’s
home movies, psychedelic clips from Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas (starring Johnny Depp)
and interviews with both of Hunter’s wives
into his film. What emerges is a definitive biography
of (as described by director Alex Gibney) America’s
first blogger, Dr. Hunter Thompson.

In New York City,
a prospective teacher must take twelve credits,
more or less, in the college Education department
—courses that are universally thought to
be not only bores but a waste of time. Real teachers
get their inspiration from the movies. In Richard
LaGravenese's Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell
takes on the toughest kids in town by having them
write their own stories, a technique that somehow
leads all of her students to attend college. In
Liz Friedlander's Take the Lead, Pierre
Dulaine motivates rough high-schoolers by teaching
them to dance Latin, culminating in their participating
in a major dance competition that combines ballroom
with street. Then again, some educators get their
students to care about the subject by being just
plain nuts, as did Herbert Gower, playing an escapee
from a mental institution who gets to sub for
a day in Arthur Hiller's Teachers.

Andrew Fleming's
Hamlet 2 pays no homage to stable, sane
teachers like the real-life Erin Gruwell. In the
movie he co-wrote with Pam Brady, he holds the
view (if one may generalize) that the wackier
the teacher, the more chance of a connection with
so-called street-wise students. After all, anybody
can teach an honors program. How to reach the
reluctant? No better actor could have been chosen
for the role of drama teacher Dana Marschz than
Steve Coogan, a forty-two year old Manchester-born
comic whose most celebrated movie is arguably
24 Hour Party People. The party he appears to
be throwing throughout the entire 92 minutes of
"Hamlet 2" is not one of unmixed joy
for his character, as his connubial happiness
is not shared by his wife, Brie (Catherine Keener)--who
regularly accuses him, with justification, of
shooting blanks. He has fights with the principal
of the Tucson, Arizona school (filmed in Albuquerque),
he battles his love for a nip o' the craythur,
he must deal with a rambunctious bunch of Latino
street kids.

While more gag
set-ups drop like lead than not, the picture on
the whole is a great deal of fun—if you
don't insist on the joke-a-minute that laugh tracks
interrupt religiously on TV sitcoms.

Director Fleming
introduces us briefly to the character of Dana
Marschz, a guy with the unpronounceable name,
with clips from two commercials, one of which
is a cute take-off on a herpes medication. When
he has no more luck in Hollywood than Betty Elms/Diane
Selwyn in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,
he winds up teaching drama in a Tucson High School,
first to two kids, Rand (Skylar Astin) and Christian
Epiphany (Phoebe Strole), then to a boatload when
other arts programs are cancelled. It takes him
time to catch the gag of the class wise guy Octavio
(Joseph Julian Soria), who, when asked to introduce
himself comes out with "My name is Heywood
Jablome." When principal Rocker (Marshall
Bell), who resembles a drill instructor more than
a school head, informs Marschz that the drama
program will be shut down for good at the end
of the term, Marschz must convince the school
board otherwise by dazzling the anticipated audience
with a play.

Hamlet 2 resembles
Shakespeare like Rush Limbaugh doubles for Al
Sharpton. The controversial drama finds the kids,
newly charged with a love for the stage, singing
"Rock Me Jesus" while Hamlet, resuscitated
via a time machine, forgives his father. (I thought
it was his uncle that had to be forgiven, but
no matter.)

Side character
steal scenes when they can, particularly a hilarious
appearance by Amy Poehler as ACLU attorney Cricket
Feldstein, who makes a case that closing down
the show before it gets off the ground violates
the First Amendment. Elisabeth Shue, by contrast,
comes across stiff playing Elisabeth Shue, who,
burned out by Hollywood, now works as a nurse.
David Arquette says practically nothing as a boarder
that the cash-starved Marshzes take in. The school
play, which features songs that are a mix of Sondheim
and Webber, is a keeper, but Steve Coogan anchors
the production, a fellow whose very appearance
can evoke audience laughter. Hamlet 2,
using the ten million dollar indie production's
time machine, could solicit no small number of
laughs from the Bard himself.

Moviegoers across
our fair country have accepted, nay even embraced,
the idea that summertime calls for light fare:
books we can read at the beach, theater that leaves
us feeling good, and big-studio movies that allow
us to check our brains at the door. Prone as we
critics are to seek out indies that help us to
explain the human condition, there are exceptions
that give us hope for big-studio fare. Pixar studio's
Wall-E is one major offering this summer
that appears to have almost unanimous critical
acceptance. But for the most part, we understand
that the megaplex will offer the likes of Hellboy
2, The Incredible Hulk, You
Don't Mess with the Zohan and The Love
Guru.

Thanks to Mike
Myers's vanity project in that last citation,
Hancock cannot be called the worst movie
of the summer. However, even by action-adventure
standards, namely those movies targeted to the
16-25 year-olds, Peter Berg's creation scripted
by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, is a dud.
You'd think that with a budget of $150 million,
money that could go quite a way toward hiring
hundreds more Wall-E's to clean up our
waste, you could dream up a movie that does not
assault us with CGI and stunt work involving a
human being's ability to take off like a speeding
bullet, able to leap tall buildings with a single
bound, and who, more powerful than a locomotive,
cannot make a soft landing in L.A. Every time
the title character, a sometimes airborne superhero
played by Will Smith, sets himself back down on
terra firma, he uproots enough concrete to assure
employees of companies with government road-repair
contracts of steady jobs even during our current
recessionary times.

Aside from a clever
twist that I couldn't see coming at just about
midpoint, director Berg (The Kingdom)
must have figured that the public would eat up
a film with an original idea, and it is an intriguing
one: that a superhero who has lived for centuries
without aging—just as do Captain Marvel,
Superman, Wonder Woman, maybe Spiderman—would
be so sick and tired of his job that he would
drink himself into a stupor, not bother shaving,
and take naps not at a super-home but on a park
bench. A fallen superhero, not bad. Premise notwithstanding,
the hackneyed car crashes, train wrecks, building
destructions, automatic artillery still dominate
the picture while the human angle, which should
have been exploited more and with greater subtlety,
exists as a throwaway. The dreary explanation
of Hancock's origin sounds like pure gobbledygook.

As for the human
angle: We first meet Hancock (Will Smith) sleeping
off a hangover on a park bench, called an a-hole
by a kid as he will be called many times throughout
the story. Having aroused the public to dislike
him because everywhere the superhero goes to stop
crimes, he creates wreckage, Hancock is about
to get a makeover by a public relations executive,
Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), whose life he had
saved albeit at the cost of wrecking cars and
a locomotive in the process. Embrey teaches Hancock
to say "Good job" to police, a start
toward gaining the public's affection, and to
try to do his superwork without so much collateral
damage. If Hancock is to change radically though,
it will not be through another man's counsel but
through the chemistry he develops with Embrey's
gorgeous wife, Mary (Charlize Theron). Almost
needless to say, there a kid in the picture, Aaron
(Jae Head), who adores Hancock and is about the
only guy who doesn't call him an a-hole. On the
other hand, Eddie Marsan plays Red, a villain
who winds up in jail thanks to a Hancock intervention
during a crime, and who is determined to locate
the hero's kryptonite and do him in.

Hancock tries
to appeal to everyone, mixing genres so quickly
that the movie cannot bear the weight of its central
theme: that nobody's perfect, that we all have
vulnerabilities that should be worked on while
at the same time we must accept what we cannot
change. Explosions give way to sermonizing, romance
steps aside for tragedy. The feelgood ending is
even more absurd than any mystical notions introduced
in the movie about the hero's origins, while subtlety
and nuance take a summer vacation.

Who's to say that
Pan's Labyrinth is an art film while
Hellboy II: The Golden Army is mere comic-book
fantasy for the younger set? Surely not Guillermo
del Toro, credited for directing both, using the
kind of imagination that most of us are said to
lose by the time we're fourteen years of age.
Pan's Labyrinth gets its "art"
label partly because of its original title, "El
labyrinto del fauno," but largely because
it's anchored by an actual historical event, the
Spanish Civil War, whereby in the fascist Spain
of 1944, the bookish young stepdaughter of a sadistic
army officer escapes into an eerie but captivating
fantasy world. Let's say, then that Hellboy
II may be (hopefully) not set during any
realistic period, though its Manhattan location
brings to mind Al Pacino's character, Lt. Col.
Frank Slade's comment in Scent of a Woman,
calling New York "freak show central."
Where else can people who look like Hellboy, aka
Red (Ron Perlman), a literally flaming woman,
Liz (Selma Blair), and a goggled, green, something
from the depth of the ocean, Abe Sapien (Doug
Jones) appear on the streets without regular human
beings looking twice?

If you skipped
the original Hellboy in 2004, also the
work of del Toro, you won't be at much disadvantage.
Just remember that a demon, raised from infancy
after being conjured by and rescued from the Nazis,
grows up to become a defender against the forces
of darkness. Remember also that this is an adaptation
of Mike Mignola's comic books, or illustrated
novels if you prefer snob appeal, and judge the
movie not for its story (it's no War and Peace)
but for its intricate visual details. In the general
mayhem that takes up the major part of the film,
you won't get much character development outside
of the love between the title character and Liz
(who is pregnant but keeps that detail hidden),
but the picture is about good versus evil—and
there's not much negotiating going on between
the two forces.

Consider the Mexican
director's imagination as without limit, especially
since he is obviously given quite a budget for
letting his creative side take off. In the story,
Hellboy has allied himself with Tom Manning (Jeffrey
Tambor) who is with the secret organization based
in Trenton, New Jersey known as the Bureau of
Paranormal Research and Defense. The organization
is not unlike our own Homeland Security department
except that it deals with supernatural enemies.
What causes the latest problem with the forces
of darkness? A truce between human beings and
an underworld group has been broken by Prince
Nuada (Luke Goss), intent on raising a Golden
Army of giant warriors to lay claim to the Earth.
Hellboy is determined to fight the bad guys with
his fists, while the prince has the jump on him,
literally, with his ability to turn eight somersaults
in seven seconds and flip a sword or spear around
his arm with more class and pomp than the captain
of the Trenton High School cheerleaders. Princess
Nuada (Anna Walton) serves as the prince's sister,
a traitor to the cause as she sides with the human
beings. She hides the third part of the prince's
crown—which of course is recovered by his
highness in time to awaken the ferocious golden
army. This leads to the climactic battle in Northern
Ireland, of all places: Red vs. Prince, with the
army agreeing to follow the command of the winner.

Special effects
are paramount, including hundred of cockroach-like
creatures that devour a lot more than your Sunday
picnic and are not the nice guys as represented
in Wall-E; a gorilla with antlers, an
aquatic creature with the green head and goggles,
and some faceless hordes from the titled golden
army. The proceedings are filmed by Guillermo
Navarro, whose camera takes in some occasional
wisecracking by Hellboy (nothing worth mentioning
here unless you find a drunken rendition of Barry
Maniolow's "Can't Smile Without You"
by Hellboy and his pal Abe). If anyone doubts
that movies are the visual medium par excellence,
this picture will serve to convince.

After almost two
decades, Indiana Jones is back and, I am stunned
to report, he’s in better shape than ever.
As a matter of fact, Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (a bloody mouthful)
is the best Indy yet! And I do not say
that lightly.

I recently revisited
the trilogy on DVD. The major revelation for me
was how my least favorite, Temple of Doom,
has now become my favorite; it’s certainly
the strangest, but also the most original. Raiders
of the Lost Ark, the most revered, seemed
like a prologue (a damned good one).

After so many years
and so many nixed scripts, David Koepp (with story
credit going to series conceivers: George Lucas
and Jeff Nathanson) manages a smart, clever and
exciting screenplay filled with the expected as
well as a good dose of the unexpected. In particular,
the explanation of the origins of the crystal
skulls is pretty creative and thought-provoking
stuff.

It’s 1957,
twenty years after Last Crusade, and
the Cold War is at freezing temperature, the atomic
age has arrived and UFO’s are the latest
craze. Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”
plays over the opening credits to perfectly ground
us in a particular place and time.

Professor Indiana
Jones (Harrison Ford, not looking his age at all)
has found himself the subject of governmental
suspicion and is forced to take a leave from his
University post. Here the filmmakers smartly capture
the paranoia of the time where everyone’s
patriotism can be called into doubt regardless
of your past heroism and proven loyalty (hmmm…resonates
pretty sharply today…)

Our generation-gapped
duo soon find themselves being chased by Soviet
spies, led by the cunning, calculating and captivating
Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) who is described
as “Stalin’s fair-haired girl,”
despite her brunette cereal-bowl do. Irina and
her gang of Reds are on a mission to realize the
new annihilation frontier: psychic warfare.

Before you can
say: Roswell, Indy is on the run and lands right
in the midst of an atomic testing site. The insane
way he survives a nuclear blast is one of the
film’s best sequences and the screen tableau
of Ford with mushroom cloud is unforgettable.

Soon, it’s
off to Peru where Boy-hybrid and our snake-fearing
hero become enmeshed in a search for yet another
rare and life-changing archaeological find: the
Crystal Skull of Akator, a legendary relic that
has supernatural powers.

Monkeys, giant
ants, Karen Allen and, yes, a large snake get
in their way and many terrific CGI effects later,
the gang find the “Kingdom”…the
city of Gold, which houses the 13 Crystal Skulls
leading to quite the climax.

Steven Spielberg
has assembled a kick-ass ensemble peppered with
a bevy of tremendously talented Brits (redundant?)
including: John Hurt; Ray Winstone and Jim Broadbent.
Each bring their own unique gifts to their roles.

Chameleon Cate
Blanchett, speaking with a strong ‘where-are-moose-and-squirrel
Russian accent, is deliciously evil as Irina Spalko,
Soviet baddie. Irina is cunning and determined
and Blanchett plays her to the hilt, having a
villainous field day. And as with all Blanchett
interpretations, there is more than just villainy
afoot. Her final moments are particularly extraordinary.

It’s a delight
to see spunky Karen Allen back as Indy’s
great love, Marion Ravenwood. Allen looks fantastic
and brings out the sparring-best in Ford. She
was sadly missing from Doom and Last
Crusade. Kudos to the person who had the
good sense to bring her back.

And who knew that
Shia LaBeouf was the stuff of matinee idols? I
can totally see a Young Indy series taking off
based on the charm and dash he displays as Mutt.
Whether he’s all leathered-out a la’
Brando in The Wild One or sword fighting
with Blanchett while on separate Jeeps (an astounding
scene), LaBeouf proves he’s got what it
takes to give the Leos in the business a run for
their millions.

Now, about Mr.
Ford. I must admit: I’m not a fan. Truth
to be told, except for Han Solo and a brilliant
performance in Peter Weir’s highly underrated,
little seen gem, The Mosquito Coast,
I’ve never been impressed with his talents.
He has played it too safe with his choices as
well as his portrayals. So it is with shock and
bewilderment that I say his performance in Crystal
Skull is not just one of his best, it’s
refreshingly self-mocking and, at times, even
poignant. The cockiness is still there but has
melded into a more pensive and reflective arrogance.
If action-adventure performances received Oscar
nominations, Ford would be a shoo-in. Come to
think of it, The Fugitive, an overrated,
overblown Ford starrer, did receive a Best Picture
nomination back in 1993, but Ford’s performance
(rightly) did not. Perhaps it’s time to
justly reward Ford with recognition for going
above and beyond what anyone expected and proving
he has what it takes.

Tech credits are
sensational from the great Janusz Kaminski’s
breathtaking camerawork to Mary Zophres’
period-perfect costumes. The rousing John Williams’
score is as defining as it is contagious. And
the visuals are mind-blowing. I could have lived
without some of the cute creatures created only
for merchandising purposes…so unnecessary
from Lucas and Spielberg who can collectively
buy the world with their monies!

Spielberg is a
fascinating study. I happen to think that Munich
is his masterpiece. I find his later work more
interesting than his earlier films. Genuine love
for the medium, a commanding technique, along
with a solid handle on characterization permeates
most of the second half of his filmography. So
even in an action-adventury, thrill-ride like
Indiana Jones, we find more attention given
to what the characters have to say to one another
via dialogue or simple facial expressions. Spielberg
is no longer afraid to slow things down a bit
to tell a better, more nuanced story.

A small handful
of Skull naysayers have been speculating
that Spielberg might have been bored directing
this follow-up; insinuating passion is not evident
in the end result. I would argue the contrary
for he is not only reverential to the history
of his characters but highly aware of the need
to take the saga to a more urgent and timely level.
He succeeds masterfully.

Alex Holdridge'sIn Search of a Midnight Kiss
IFC First TakeOpens August 1, 2008

A recent study
by sociologists (who are probably not in their
seventies) indicates that people in their eighth
decade of life are generally happier than folks
who are middle-aged. This might be explained by
the possibility that happy people live longer,
but who knows? In any case, movies that are popular
to the principal audience at Sundance festivals
shed a good deal of light about those in the twenties.
Given the impact of hormones that make people
crazy in adolescence and continue to a large extent
in the third decade of people's lives, a twenty-something
is likely to be either miserable or deliriously
happy, methinks. The movie In Search of a
Midnight Kiss, written and directed by Alex
Holdrdige, depicts one young couple who appear
happy as larks while another twosome are miserable.
This concept, which reminds some of a Woody Allen
romance such as in Manhattan, is also
reminiscent of Richard Linklater's Before
Sunset, in which two characters meeting up
nine years later as the man passes through Paris
on a book tour, spend the day together, talking
about their feelings toward each other when they
first met.

Filmed in black-and-white
Midnight Kiss is cited in the production
notes as a love letter to Los Angeles. The parts
we see in the downtown area are rarely shown on
the screen; for example, there's one building
of dramatic architecture that looks like the Sydney
Opera House. What's more we see people who actually
go from one place to another in the subway, just
like us here in New York. The film has several
humorous touches and, like many romantic comedies,
has a bittersweet ending.

Those of us who
believe that young people today do not "date"
but simply "hang out" or "hook
up" will be surprised, as was I, to note
that not only is dating still in fashion, but
so are blind dates, just like in the 1950's. The
difference is that such meetings are moderated
by technology as people put their life stories
on Craigslist and other computer venues. Through
the magic of the 'net, a little blindness is removed.
Vivian (Sara Simmonds), a 27-year-old high-strung
woman plays the game even more straight. Before
she goes through with a date, she interviews the
guys she meets through Craigslist, giving each
five minutes in a coffee shop to see whether they
click. (This is not so unusual: some matchmaking
groups actually set up a similar system of musical
chairs whereby a guy gets to talk for five minutes
to a gal, then moves on to the next victim.) The
man that Vivian decides to spend a few hours with—on
New Year's Eve to boot, where you wouldn't expect
a good-looking blonde to seek company at the last
minute—is Wilson (Scoot McNairy), who despite,
or actually because of, his relationship with
Jacob (Brian Matthew McGuire), is desperately
lonely. He has the hots for Jacob's two-year steady,
Min (Katy Luong), in one scene spanking the money
to Min's picture on the computer. Most of the
film deals with the hours Scoot and Vivian spend
together, a challenging time as any blind date
would be but one made even more hyper by the chain-smoking,
pill-popping woman who talks a touch game but
has a secret vulnerability.

Happy or not, you
take away the idea that people pushing thirty
are pretty immature, awkwardly playing games to
avoid closeness, though Wilson, who calls himself
a misanthrope, seems to have his head on his shoulders.
The language that these young 'uns use regularly,
the sorts of words that in the fifties prompted
men to say, "Pardon my French," are
voiced even more regularly by the woman, at least
in this case, making this a story that features
romance, comedy, and tenderness, all partly ruined
by an over-the-top episode wherein Vivian's ex-boyfriend,
Jack (Robert Murphy, who doubles as cinematographer)
demands that Vivian return to him lest he burn
some items in her flat.

While some moviegoers
are likely to find LA prettier in black-and-white
than in full color, I'd have to say that b&w
is an affected choice that does nothing for the
pic. Scoot McNairy stands out here as a geeky,
awkward guy who seems clueless about women.

Sony Pictures
Classics
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-

Two-score years
of 20th Century Czechoslovak history are exploited
for full entertainment value in an exhilarating
film that the Czech Republic has tapped as its
entry for the 2008 Academy Awards. Anchored by
a stunning performance by Ivan Barnev as Jan Dite,
a short, blond, naïve fellow with dreams
of rising from hotel waiter to millionaire, I
Served the King, a title taken from a quote
by the maitre d' of Prague's most exclusive hotel,
is an enthralling story. It is suffused with cinematographer
Jaromir Sofr's arresting variety of visual styles,
including the techniques of silent film and surrealism,
and Ales Brezina's musical soundtrack serves as
background to a story that with some imagination
could serve as an elaborate ballet.

Writer-director
Jiri Menzel, whose techniques were influenced
by the films of Charlie Chaplin, Rene Clair, and
Jean Renoir, is fortunate in adapting Bohumil
Hrabal's novel to the screen, as Hrabal cleverly
uses the life of a fictional Czech everyman to
cast a cynical, humorous, satiric look at his
country from the years 1920 through about 1960—a
nation alternately ruled by the Nazis and Communists,
powers that had a profound effect on Mr. Dite
for short-term pleasures, but ultimately a life
brought short by political events.

The film, known
in its subtitled Czech as Obsluhoval jsem
anglickeho krale, has been influenced by
the 1960's New Wave, a school known for dark and
absurd humor which for the Czechs like directors
Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Ivan Passer and
others dealt with the love-confusion of young
people and the absence of morality in Czechoslovak
society. The movement ended after the 1968 Soviet
clampdown in the so-called Prague spring liberalization,
leading many directors to flee the country while
others, like Jiri Menzel, faced censorship of
their works.

Menzel, whose 1967
Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains
(Ostre sledovane vlaky) adapted Bohumil
Hrabal's story of a young man who follows his
father's footsteps and joins the railway company,
where he learns the job and has his first affair,
here explores themes of money, sex, power and
greed. The now-aging Jan Dite (Oldrich Kaiser),
having been just freed from almost fifteen years
in a Prague prison per Communist persecution of
"millionaire-exploiters," has been sent
to the Sudetenland where, following World War
2, the Germans have been expelled. The buildings
are now is in ruins, though Dite fixes up a cabin
while he looks back on his life, particularly
his memories of women, wealthy hotel guests, and
a short-lived financial success. Jan Dite's name
is not an arbitrary one, but one that in English
means "John Child"—in other words
an immature fellow and to a large extent an Everyman.
During the 1920s' Dite (now played by the Bulgarian-born
Ivan Barnev) had only one ambition—to sell
frankfurters to passengers on the trains. We watch
in silent-film mode as he winds up keeping a passenger's
large bill, as the train pulls out to quickly
for Dite to make change.

Fate takes Dite
away from the train station, into posh Prague
hotels where he serves as waiter par excellence,
literally dancing around the tables as he dishes
out steins of Pilsner and an array of restaurant
courses. He admires the maitre d', to whose position
he aspires, though he would not likely attain
the class of a man who can speak Korean, German,
French, Czech and who knows what other languages
to the international guests. He has affairs with
some beautiful hookers whose clients are mostly
the capitalist guests, though he falls for a Nazi
ideologue, Liza (Julia Jentsch), who insists on
staring at a large portrait of Hitler as she and
Dite make love. When the Nazis exit and the Communists
take their place, Dite is no longer the naïve
opportunist—having been ground down, but
still smiling, by the vicissitudes of life.

While the story
itself is a keeper and Ivan Barnev a natural for
playing a Candide-like character, the miracle
of the film lies largely in writer-director Jiri
Menzel's dare-one-say choreography, a man whose
thematic vision is nicely realized by Jaromir
Sofr's lensing. The most darkly humorous incidents
revolve around the Nazi plan to gather Germany's
most beautiful women in a eugenics program, women
who await sperm-test results of "Aryan"
men before they pair off and enter separate rooms
of the hotel for breeding. The film is replete
with voice-overs, too many particularly in the
opening segment, but embracing the strongest point
that "A person becomes human almost against
his own will." Too bad it takes so many decades
for a child to become a man, or as the Pennsylvania
Dutch like to say, "We get old too soon and
too late schmart."

This 3-D feature
looks on one level to be a long product placement
from the Icelandic Government Department of Tourism.
Or not. It all depends on what kind of travel
you like. Do you favor looking at the churches
and museums of Europe while walking on the historic
cobblestone streets? Or are you more for vivid
physical action—skydiving, white-water rafting,
surfing (not the internet)? If the latter, you
might want to visit a place closer to home than
the Continent which has traditionally been only
a stop-off point for Icelandair on the way to
Luxembourg. Iceland has some great paths for hiking
and camping: if you go to the right spot you can
fall literally miles down to the center of the
earth. So say Mr. Verne and director Brevig. But
don't worry, you land in deep water which is fine
if you hit feet first like the three principals
in Eric Brevig's contemporary adaptation of the
French sci-fi writer Jules Verne's Journey
to the Center of the Earth.

With a script by
Michael Weiss, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin,
Brevig takes a reasonable amount of time developing
the three characters, a trio who know one another
either not at all or only remotely but who bond
when facing life-threatening adventures. While
Verne may not necessarily have targeted the junior-high
crowd for the products of his fertile imagination,
Brevig's cinema version would probably be less
than successful with a youthful crowd in anything
but a 3-D format. The adventure itself is by the
numbers, the animals like one dinosaur and an
assortment of man-eating fish would be less than
frightening in 2-D, while the one-dimensional
characters would not likely capture the rapt attention
of the little ones in the audience.

But we are talking
3-D and Journey does a creditable job
pushing bouncing yo-yo's, shark-like creature
with perfect white and sharp teeth, scores of
gems, a friendly, phosphorescent bird and the
like almost directly into our faces. Brendan Fraser
(who was in the audience at today's New York screening
to introduce the movie) anchors the story as Trevor
Anderson, a geology professor teased by a colleague
for being too dull to recruit a decent-size class.
His brother, Max, was lost a decade earlier while
researching volcanic tubes and Trevor's own job
is in jeopardy for lack of funding. All's well
that ends well, though, provided that he risks
his life in a baptism of fire, an adventure that
takes wing when Trevor is visited by Max's 13-year-old
son, Sean Anderson (played by Josh Hutcherson,
a 15-year-old known as Robin Williams' son in
RV and for a starring role in Firehouse
Dog). Though he is charged by Sean's mom
to babysit for 10 days, without getting permission
from his sister-in-law, Trevor embarks with Sean
on a trip that traces Max's, using Verne's novel
as a guide.

In Iceland (filmed
largely in Montreal studios by Chuck Shuman),
uncle and nephew join with an old scientist's
beautiful daughter, Hannah (Anita Briem), who
acts as mountain guide, the three taking to a
mountain volcano, paying the hottie 5,000 kroner
a day ($64.96). This is money that may never have
to be paid given the many ways all three could
have perished like Max. Here is one movie in which
the quote "a roller coaster ride" would
be literal: the most exciting segment finds the
trio riding helter-skelter a mining rail line
with the speed that Amtrak wishes its so-called
premium Acela service could reach. They find spectacular
stones in the cavern, are lusted after by hungry,
carnivorous plants, they bat giant, flying man-eating
fish into right field and left with bats, and
run like crazy to escape a huge dinosaur that
burrows right through the cave wall that does
not quite protect them.

In the end, the
materialistic teen discovers that the "boring"
geology professor is his ideal father-substitute,
the icy blonde thaws, throwing a few modest kisses
to Trevor (extreme danger is nature's Viagra),
and Trevor funds his department with gems found
downunder. Unfortunately, in the absence of a
camera, no-one will believe the professor, but
we in the audience now realize that Jules Verne
was writing not sci-fi but actual fact. This movie
tells us so. The production values are stunning,
the fast-moving plot is pedestrian, and the kids
in the audience will enjoy a nightmare hours later.

Catherine Breillat
is known for her audaciously sexual films, the
closest to pornographic being Romance—about
a female teacher sleeping in the same bed as her
boyfriend but who, lacking intimacy, begins an
affair with the school's headmaster. When the
public became aware that she was making a costume
drama, The Last Mistress (formerly An
Old Mistress), some wags probably could not
resist the urge to say "What kind of costume—a
birthday suit?" Considered by the writer-director
to be her favorite film to date and also perhaps
her most accessible to the movie-going public,
The Last Mistress is a lushly photographed
drama written at about the same time as Pierre
Chandelos de Laclos's Les liaisons Dangereuses
and based on the scandalous 19th century novel
by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly about a handsome libertine
in the Paris of 1835 who cannot forsake his ten-year-old
affair despite resolving to do so before he took
marriage vows with another. Featuring an exciting
debut role by Fu'ad Ait Aatou in the role of a
young, strikingly handsome albeit feminine lover,
the film is clearly helmed by a the hand of a
female regisseur. The story takes place in Paris
and the countryside, the latter filmed by Yorgos
Arvanitis on the island of Brehas off the northern
coast of Bretagne. This can be called a tale with
an 18th-century outlook on a 19th' century palette
in that France was more sexually broadminded during
the age of aristocracy than when it fell under
middle class dominance during the reign of citizen-king
Louis Phillippe.

The story, replete
with heavy doses of passion and its inevitable
accompaniment, anguish, centers on a society with
plenty of time for gossip and dalliance. It is
framed by the chattering Vicomte de Prony (Michael
Lonsdale), enjoying a gourmet dinner with the
Countess dArtelles (Yolande Moreau), announcing
to her that he is going to enjoy breaking the
news to Vellini (Asia Argento) that her long-term
lover, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aatou), is soon
to marry the beautiful, rich, Hermangarde (Roxane
Mesquida). The angelic Hermangarde is chaperoned
by her grandmother, Marquise de Flers (Claude
Sarraute). Pretending "no worries,"
Villeni, the Spanish-born title figure who dressed
appropriately like the devil at a costume party,
is determined to maintain intimate ties with her
long-term lover, one whom gossipers wonder about--as
he has been together with the same woman for a
whole decade even though unencumbered by marriage.
The inquisitive, broad-minded grandmother, a product
emotionally of the more liberated 18th century,
prods her grandson-to-be to tell her the tale
of the ten-year liaison. A sizable flashback follows
which hones in on Ryno's meeting with the Spanish
woman, married to a much older gentleman, who
initially despises him but becomes enamored of
his assertiveness to become her lover. The young
man is smitten by the passion of this matador's
daughter, her manly voice and her individualistic
dress which would be more at home in Seville than
in Paris.

What appears to
emerge thematically is the close tie between passion
and violence: in one scene that should bring gasps
to some in the audience, a playful Vellini removes
a large pin from her hair and quickly runs the
blade across her lover's face. He is pleased by
the gesture. While the grandmother, now reclining,
appears to be taking the story in with pleasure,
she is somehow convinced that notwithstanding
the Don Juanism of her granddaughter's future
husband, he can be trusted to remain solely with
her. But can he do so when Vellini, like Glenn
Close's Alex Forrest in Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction,
refuses to leave him alone and when Marigny is
hardly disposed to dumping her? Given the stellar
performances of Italian-born Asia Argento and
Fu'ad Ait Aattou's, whose chemistry burns in several
nude scenes of simulated sex, The Last Mistress
would appear headed for solid arthouse box office.

As for universal
relevance despite its location squarely in the
first half of the 19th century in a country that
still used aristocratic titles like comte and
countess, don't we all know of the girl who is
left behind at the sound of wedding bells but
who somehow finds herself a central figure in
the mind and body of the newly married man? And
are we not today unable to hide from the barrage
of gossip and celebrity magazines that deal with
who broke up with whom and who emerged triumphant
in the game of love? The Last Mistress
is a period piece, then, that transcends its time,
an entertaining fable about our favorite theme
in literature, the theater and the cinema: l'amour.

I had the dubious
distinction of attending one of the very first
performances of Mamma Mia! on Broadway
in October of 2001. I’ve always enjoyed
the music of ABBA and Chess (written by Benny
Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the men of ABBA)
is one of my favorite musicals, however I did
not like the show! I actually wanted to leave
after intermission; something I never do! The
book was facile and weak making the show seem
like nothing but fluff with swell songs. Of course,
regardless of my opinion, Mamma Mia!
became a worldwide phenomenon. Since it’s
unveiling in London in 1999, the show that boasts
audiences “dancing in the aisles”
(they really do!) has opened in over one-hundred-and-seventy
major cities and is proven box office gold nearly
everywhere it is staged!

I still stand by
my intense dislike of the show. So when Meryl
Streep signed to do the film, I thought…is
she on crack? Then I saw the trailer and was convinced
she was on crack. Anyone who reads my work knows
how much I adore La Streep, but even she can make
a mistake (anyone ever see She-Devil?
Okay, she was good, but c’mon!)

I am not surprised
and very pleased to report that Meryl continues
to prove she can do no wrong as Mamma Mia!
is an absolutely delightful motion picture;
a throwback to the old beach movies with a touch
of cheesy 80’s technodazzle and a dash of
the 60’s Brit rocker flix.

Now, it isn’t
Singin’ in the Rain, Cabaret
or All That Jazz (my favorite musical),
but it ain’t Can’t Stop the Music,
The Producers or the horrific Phantom
of the Opera either.

The plot is carbon
copied from a terrific 60’s film starring
Gina Lollobrigida titled Buona Sera,
Mrs. Campbell. Meryl plays former gal-group
lead singer, Donna, who gave everything up twenty
years ago to raise her daughter away from her
own disapproving mother, on a remote Greek island.
Now, twenty, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) rummages
through her mom’s diary to try and discover
who her real father is and finds three candidates
(Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard).
She decides to invite all three to her wedding
to the hot and hunky Sky (Dominic Cooper). Along
for the ride are Donna’s two former back-up
singers/best friends (the fabulous Julie Walters
and Christine Baranski).

Streep gets to
tap into her zany/silly self but there is always
more to her comedy than surface hijinks. And she
allows herself to glam-down so Donna is a believable
working mother who will stop at nothing to protect
her daughter. The shot of her face watching Sophie
walk away after “Slipping Through My Fingers”
is a remarkable testament to her acting. In one
brief moment the entire mother/daughter relationship
is revealed. She must let go, no matter how painful
it is.

Seyfried, so good
on HBO’s Big Love, and Cooper,
so good in The History Boys on stage
and screen, provide delicious eye-candy but also
happen to be wonderful actors. Baranski and, especially
Walters, steal every scene they are in. It’s
a delight to see older women in starring roles!
About fucking time, Hollywood!

A few major musical
highlights include: Baranski’s dynamic rendition
of “Does Your Mother Know” directed
towards a sex-crazed guy half her age; Walters’
hilarious seduction of Skarsgard with “Take
a Chance on Me;” Streep and company belting
the title tune and the insanely staged “Dancing
Queen” which becomes a feminist anthem parade.
At the numbers end the all-media audience burst
into applause. How rare is that?

But the best moment
is Streep’s sensational tour de force vocal
of “The Winner Takes It All” where
the constantly gyrating camera stops for five
minutes and allows magnificent Meryl to reach
deep down into her guts and unearth all the pain
she’s been feeling since Brosnan left her.
It’s a towering moment and could bring her
a fifteenth Oscar nomination (although word is
the film version of Doubt will do that).
She will certainly get Golden Globe love!

Mamma Mia!
is a cheeky kaleidoscope of loony merriment
boasting gorgeous locales, dizzying camerawork
and a curious gay sensibility--even though most
of it’s creative team are women. Director
Phillyida Lloyd doesn’t break any new ground,
nor does the flimsy script—although it’s
far superior to the stage book. And some of the
musical numbers should have been cut and replaced
with real dialogue scenes--specifically “When
All is Said and Done” which Brosnan cannot
quite do justice to.

Yet, when all is
said and done, Mamma Mia! will provide
audiences with a welcome non-action treat this
summer. Chances are they might decide to dance
in the aisles. I know if I knew how to dance,
I would have led the crowd!

People of "a
certain age," which is to say the mature
adults who are expected to be this movie's prime
audience, would do well to go into the theater
not expecting the brilliant tunes and thematic
depth of Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific
as a case in point) or the remarkable wit
and biting satirical thrusts of Lerner and Loewe
(My Fair Lady, for example), or complex,
atonal gems buy Stephen Sondheim (Sunday in
the Park With George). There are only two
or three songs that will remain with most of us
the morning after. Nonetheless the stage show
has had twenty productions, nine currently running,
with an estimated 17,000 people seeing Mamma
Mia! every night in various parts of the
world.
What accounts for the popularity? For one (not
necessarily a compliment), there's its simplicity.
The dialogue borders on the banal, the music lacks
variety. For these reasons some critics have denigrated
the work as "fit for tourists," but
then again, there's nothing wrong with seeing
the world through the eyes of a tourist, as one
young man in the show explains to his bride-to-be.

Thanks to the magic
of cinema, the stage production has been greatly
expanded, the first thing noticeable being Haris
Zambarloukos's lensing on a remote Greek island,
which looks out on pure blue water, a sun-streaked
sky, both giving birth to inhabitants with lobster-red
skin. If this is not an unintentional product
placement for the Greek National Tourist Office,
what is? Some have called Mamma Mia!
a chick flick since none of director Phyllida
Lloyd's leading men come close to carrying the
story when compared to the principal cast of women.

Each time a well-known
actor like Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth or Stellan
Skarsgard is given a few introductory notes from
an invisible orchestra, the audience might sit
on the edge of their seats wondering whether these
remarkable performers can even carry a tune. The
best one can say about the fellas is that they
are good sports for being willing to expose their
vocal chords for critical judgment. One of them,
in fact, exposes a bit more while making breakfast.
The real surprise is Meryl Streep, the star of
the show, who can sing—although not quite
up to the level that would prompt a job offer
from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

No matter: this
is a summer treat, an uncomplicated feel-good
song-fest that has the actors obviously enjoying
themselves immensely, even while figuring that
some of us will think their vocalizing is campy
rather than serious.

The women seem
to be on speed while the guys are the usual, relatively
calm selves that men tend to be. The movie is
all about exuberance, female exuberance in particular,
the uncomplicated story an excuse to squeeze in
twenty songs—of which the best known are
"Mamma Mia!," "Dancing Queen,"
and "Super Trouper."

The concept is
this (and one must forget there is such a thing
as DNA, even though the action takes place in
1999): Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a twenty-year-old
who has known no life except that on a tight little
Greek isle, discovers in her mother's diary that
twenty-one years ago her mom slept with three
males, one of whom must be Sophie's dad. Determined
to find out who, she secretly invites all three,
using her mother's name—Sam (Pierce Brosnan),
Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard)
to her upcoming wedding to Sky (Dominic Cooper).
She does not tell her mother about this as Donna
(Meryl Streep), who owns a falling-apart hotel,
has no intention of seeing them again. Surprisingly
they all show up, none hiding a potential paternity,
each competing to "give away" the bride
the following day. Adding to the frenzied preparations,
Donna's best friends, the brash Rosie (Julie Walters)
and the wealthy divorcee Tanya (Christine Baranski),
cavort about, making no secret that they are hunting
guys of their own, whether for a couple of days
or for a lifetime.

The action is fast-moving,
the women seeming to believe that this is their
last weekend on the Earth and they're determined
to make the most of it, or as the inebriated Agnes
Gooch would say in Mame, "Live,
Live Live!" Meryl Streep again demonstrates
that she is perhaps America's greatest living
actress, a multi-talented woman who can play a
tragic title figure in Sophie's Choice,
a metallurgy worker at risk of being murdered
by her corporate bosses in Silkwood,
and now a singing, dancing, emoting ball of fire
in Mamma Mia! Have fun!

When
the Iron Curtain came down, a massive change in
perception accompanied the change in decor. Everything
that was old was new again: western culture, democracy,
the Russian monarchy and Genghis Khan!!!

Genghis Khan! Yes
Genghis Khan!

Russian filmmaker
Sergei Bodrov does not like stereotypes and the
story of Genghis Kahn appealed to him. Both Russian
and European history books tell the story of Kahn
with the same venom used to talk about the rise
and fall of Adolph Hitler. In fact, it was against
the law to even speak the name of Genghis Khan
in the Soviet satellite state of Mongolia. But
as Budrov explained, history is written by the
victors and the Mongols were eventually conquered
and sent back to Mongolia. And the Mongolians
were not historians.

Bodrov's film Mongol
tells the story of the early years of Kahn's life
based on a poem that survived from the 12th Century
(Bodrov is seriously considering filming a trilogy
similar to Lord of the Rings). Mongol
follows Kahn from the age of ten when the young
Temudgin (the future Genghis Khan played by Tadanobu
Asano) first meets the love his life, Borte (played
by Khulan Chuluun).

Soon afterwards,
Termudgin loses his father and becomes a fugitive,
running and hiding from Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov),
the warrior who takes over his father's tribe.
Mongolia was a cruel and beautiful land and young
Termudgin is forced to live a life where truly,
"Only the strong survive." And survive
he does, fighting Targutai and then fighting the
tribe of his "blood brother," Jamukha
(Honglei Sun). And with each fight, he becomes
stronger and attracts more and more followers
until he finally unites the Mongolian nation.
And the rest of history, even if it is history
only told by the historians of the eventually
victorious Russians and the Europeans. And eventually
took centuries because the Genghis Khan's descendents
rose up to conquer all of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Mongol
is an epic film. The scenes set in the Mongolian
plains are simply stunning. The costumes are luxurious
(Karin Lohr, SFK)and the interiors of the tents
are richly appointed (Dashi Namdakov). The fight
scenes are simply spectacular (credit to stun
choregraphers Zhaidarbek Kunguzhinov and Jung
Doo Hong). The film is also blessed with a great
soundtrack with contributions by Finnish composer
Tuomas Kantelinen and by Altan Urag, an eight-person
Mongolian folk-rock band.

But the real beauty
of the film is the love story between two strong
characters, Termudgin and the love of his life,
Borte. For Termudgin may have been a brutal warlord,
but when he fell in love with Borte at the age
of ten, he fell in love for life.

Mongol
also benefits from a talented and charismatic
cast. Tadanobu Asano is quietly noble as the young
Genghis Kahn. Khulan Chuluun plays Borte as a
worthy partner and advisor to Khan. And Japanese
actor Honglei Sun gives a powerful performance
as Termudgin's friend/enemy, Jamukha.

Mongol was nominated
for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008. It (not
Borat) was the entry from Kazakhstan.

Columbia Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: C

The general movie-going
public generally knows about celebrity actors
like Brad Pitt and famous directors like Steven
Spielberg, but are rarely acquainted with scriptwriters
and producers. Judd Apatow is an exception. As
with Jerry Bruckheimer, who is better-known than
the directors he uses, movie buffs generally identify
pictures produced by Apatow as being Apatow pictures,
putting directors like David Gordon Green in a
separate, less holy category. Apatow may not have
been the first to vulgarize movies (I say that
in a positive way) but nowadays he is extolled
for producing such hilarious works as Superbad,
Knocked Up, Walk Hard, The
40 Year-Old Virgin and Anchorman.
While Anchorman and Talladega Nights
were comparatively mediocre thanks in part to
the unfunny performances of Steve Carrell and
Will Ferrell respectively, Superbad and
Knocked Up rate as instant classics.

With Pineapple
Express, though, the Apatow fraternity, trying
to get a little help from his friends, has generated
a comparative puff piece . The movie's principal
feature is its Woodstock ambience. Enough weed
is smoked by the two stoners to make those of
us old enough to know that the sixties are back
right now in the midst of all the panic and fear
of economic recession and mortgage foreclosures.
James Franco is appealing enough in the role of
drug-dealer Saul Silver, a laid-back guy whose
principal concern is that he has many customers
but no real friends, until he meets and goes through
life-challenging events with Dale Denton (Seth
Rogen), a patron who is becoming his best buddy.
But the hackneyed action—car chases, idiotic
bandits, a high-school senior with a family that
curses like the best of the younger set—coupled
with insipid, non-sequitur dialogue that goes
on seemingly without end for the movie's nearly
two-hour stretch—derails this express shortly
after its opening half-hour.

What promises to
be a Knocked-Up-Superbad-style
relationship between Dale Denton, a twenty-five-year
old court process server, and a young woman seven
years his junior, soon degenerates into an almost
formless story of male bonding, the ties among
disparate people firmed up after the young men
are chased by a drug kingpin who knows that one
of them had witnessed a murder.

Pineapple Express
is quite a departure for director David Gordon
Green, whose George Washington —about
how preteens in a small North Carolina town react
to a terrible accident—wooed the arthouse
crowd with its startling imagery and naturalistic
performances. Though Tim Orr's lens casts a wide
net across the big screen at the multiplex, pedestrian
panoramas take the place of dreamy cinematography.

As Dale Denton,
Seth Rogen serves subpoenas on an array of people,
using disguises to wend his way into their confidence
while at night he courts Angie (Amber Heard),
a cute high-school kid who will doubtless forget
about him when she enters college. He buys ultra-strong
marijuana from dealer Saul Silver (James Franco),
who uses the money, so he says, to keep his "bubby"
(grandmother) in a nursing home. Saul, eager to
make just one friend out of a customer, is led
by Dale into the business of murderous drug dealers
because Dale had witnessed a murder of a rival
drug lord and company, whose perps track him down
by the weed he dropped at the crime scene. Ted
Jones (Gary Cole), together with accomplices Budlofsky
(Kevin Corrigan), Matheson (Craig Robinson) and
corrupt police officer Carol (Rosie Perez) are
determined to kill Dale and anyone with whom he
has been in contact, Saul's pal Red (Danny McBride)
crosses over into the criminal conspiracy, though
Dale hopes to win him back to the cause of the
good guys. Throughout the chase, Dale has time
to meet his sweetheart's parents (Ed Begley Jr.
and Nora Dunn), who try desperately to evoke laughs
from the audience by their own vulgar vocabulary.

Director Green
might do well (albeit not financially) to go back
to his métier making indie films while
the Apatow team would do well to concentrate on
satirical romance and leave the crime genre to
Quentin Tarantino.

Magnolia Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: B

Twenty years ago
I went on a trip abroad. Rather than leave my
beloved West Highland Terrier in an impersonal
kennel, I boarded him with a private person who
took in dogs and cats to supplement her income.
Returning home, I discovered that she had gone
out of town during a week that the dog was in
her care, leaving the Westy with a guy who had
no experience with animals. The Westy, I was told,
spent most of the time in this person's cellar
and apparently had not eaten or drunk for a week.
He lost one-third of his weight, was severely
depressed, and had to be hospitalized for diagnostic
tests. I filed an action in Small Claims court
to recover the cost of the hospitalization. The
judge—who probably complained to his colleagues
that he has to deal with dog law when he should
have been appointed to the Supreme Court--simply
denied the claim without explanation. Dogcatcher,
rather than judge, would seem to be his métier.
The only "revenge" I got was that the
woman did not charge for her "services,"
though she had no explanation for her no-charge
invoice. Real revenge would not have changed the
dog's condition, but it might have made the owner
feel a modicum of satisfaction.

Since moviegoers'
attention tends to be more riveted to films with
which they can identify strongly with a character,
Red certainly piqued my interest and
regard. Though the action takes place in a rural
suburb of Portland, Oregon, it has the ambiance
of a John Ford Western bordering on a Sam Peckinpah.
Avery Ludlow (Brian Cox), a soft-spoken man in
his seventies dotes on his 14-year-old mixed Airedale
dog, Red, who accompanies him to the lake where
they enjoy fishing. One such fishing expedition
is interrupted by a scuzzy eighteen-year-old ,
Danny (Noel Fisher), and two other boys, Harold
(Kyle Gallner) and Pete (Shiloh Fernandez). Danny
point his rifle at Avery, demanding money: when
an insufficient amount is declared, Danny shoots
the dog dead. From that point, Avery is determined
to gain revenge, although at first he would be
satisfied simply to get the lad to apologize.
An escalation of tension is prompted when Danny's
rich and powerful father, Michael (Tom Sizemore),
refuses to acknowledge his son's guilt.

Brian Cox's performance
is low-key in a low-budget movie whose photographer,
Harald Gunner Paalgard, separates scenes by drenching
the entire screen in red, capturing the slow buildup
of Avery's blood pressure by a series of close-ups,
punctuating particularly the man's eyes. When
we discover that shooting a dog is classified
as a mere misdemeanor, we may remind ourselves
of the expression, "There is no justice:
only law" (though Atlanta Falcons quarterback
Michael Vick might disagree). A backstory, which
unfortunately is told (to a sympathetic newspaper
reporter played by Kim Dickens) rather than dramatized
demonstrates Avery's motivation in going all-out
to get that apology.

A simple story,
told in a straightforward narrative, would do
well on cable though as a commercial movie it
will engage the attentions primarily of dog people
and of those who believe that the rich will get
away with anything unless persistent, simply guys
like Avery persevere in bringing them down. The
story recalls Heinrich von Kleist's novella, Michael
Kohlhass, wherein in 16th century Germany
a horse dealer has two of his horses stolen by
a crooked knight who then works the nags almost
to death. The rest of the tale is about Kohlhaas's
quest for justice from the Elector of Saxony,
but justice is denied because the crooked knight
has friends in high places. Kohlhaas rebels against
the state of Saxony by forming his own army, which
attacks several Saxon towns.

American director
Lucky McKee initiated the film which was completed
by Norwegian regisseur Trygve Allister Diesen.
(Sorry, I don't know the Norwegian term for "director."
All I know to say in that language is "Luftputefartoyet
mitt er fullt av all," which means "My
hovercraft is full of eels.") An example
of Michael Kohlhaas writ small, Red
is thematically about class conflict but in the
case of the movie, intergenerational conflict
drives the story as well. Peckinpah might be proud
of the way that Avery wins justice.

Prediction: most heterosexual
male critics are not going to like this film;
most women, homosexuals and heteroflexible males
are going to love this film. Why? Because, like
the groundbreaking HBO series, the pic is about
women--all about women. All types of women. And
it turns the tables on men.

Key moment: Samantha
(the delicious Kim Cattrall) is ogling her hot
surfer neighbor while eating guacamole. She gets
to treat men the way they’ve been treating
women for centuries.

But how refreshing
to have a series (and now a film) where women
take center stage and men show up in supporting
roles. Pity some of the women still need to be
defined by men (notably the new character played
by Jennifer Hudson, but I am getting ahead of
myself…)

Is Sex and
the City a chick flick? Hell, yes! But after
a legion of crappy teen-boy oriented action flicks,
thank Christ we get something different! Even
if it’s not really different at all. Not
from the sitcom anyway.

Lovers of the series
will be in girly-heaven, but folks not as familiar
with the show, will still find things to love
about it, if they allow themselves.

For those living
on Uranus: Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker)
is a very successful writer of columns, books,
articles, etc. She is BFF with three very different,
very unique NYC gals: sex-crazed Samantha Jones;
too-sweet Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and brittle
Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon). The four women
have spent over a decade looking for love, sex,
success, trendy shopping, romance and magic in
the most enchanting place in the world—New
York City! (Anyone dare to disagree with me on
that one?)

As the film opens,
Carrie is now forty and about to marry the infamous
love of her life, Mr. Big (Chris Noth). BTW, the
character is finally given a name in the film.
Four years have gone by and: Carrie is still lovestruck;
Samantha’s gotten seemingly softer; Miranda’s
a bit harder and Charlotte is, well, more Charlotte!

En route to the
altar, Carrie is jilted by Big—although
the circumstances surrounding the way it exactly
happens is muddled at best. The point is that
series creator and writer/director of the film,
the gifted Michael Patrick King, needed to break
the two up—regardless of how questionable
the plot point might be (my date had never seen
an episode of the original series and enjoyed
the movie but, tellingly, did not buy Big’s
cold feet).

So Carrie is now
depressed. Samantha is going through what most
MEN go through after a long time with one person;
she’s getting itchy and antsy and basically
misses indiscriminate sex. Miranda has tossed
Steve out for cheating on her once in their almost-completely
sex-less relationship. (I found that plot contrivance
annoying since it makes Miranda such an unforgiving
bitch—yet it leads to such a fantastic late
scene involving the Brooklyn Bridge—enough
said!) Finally, Charlotte, after adopting a Chinese
baby, has miraculously become pregnant herself.

The film, like
the show, is more a series of vignettes than a
cohesive narrative, try as the writer’s
may, but it works magnificently because the terrific
one-liners are there as well as the amazing NYC
locales and the oddball but fascinating costumes
(and shoes, let’s not forget the shoes).
But it works, most especially, because of the
quartet of ladies onscreen.

Whether there was
any onset cat-fighting or jealousies, you would
never know it from watching these truly talented
gals “exist” in the best roles they
will probably ever play. Career-defining portrayals.

Davis is hilarious
as ever. Her moment of confrontation with Big
is a keeper but it’s a certain scene in
Mexico that will have you holding your sides in
pain. Nixon’s nuances are all there. I just
wish King hadn’t hardened her so. Cattrall
can make a cat food commercial sexy and she does
her best in the first half where poor Samantha
is stuck in a rut. Thank God the film does her
character justice in the end—even though
we never really see her do what she does best.
(A quick ogling to Gilles Marini who plays Samantha’s
hot object of lust…gangway boys and girls
and look out for a close up of the perfect ass!)

The one male allowed
to do more than have a nice scene (or nice butt
shot) is the terrific Chris Noth, bringing more
to Big than the role as written.

Finally and foremost,
Sarah Jessica Parker has never displayed more
versatility and vulnerability. This gal gets better
with age and does fabulous work here. I commend
her for allowing herself to look her age when
necessary.

At almost two and
a half hours, Sex and the City, never
feels long, although subplot involving Carrie’s
new assistant (Hudson) felt superfluous and detrimental
to positive role models for women. Yet on further
reflection, the character does fit nicely into
the Sex and the City scenario—
a world where women have choices. They may have
what they want: on their terms; at any age. And
what better message to send--even if it still
may be a fairy tale. (Can anyone argue that Hillary
has been treated fairly?)

Yes, the film could
have been more psychologically penetrating, less
predictable, more naughty and less cliché’.
But we’ll save those expectations and sexpectations
for the sequel.

Columbia Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: B-

Within the American
mainstream culture, it's considered immature to
live with your parents once you're finished with
school and out in the labor market. As with all
other members of the animal kingdom, it's time
to go when it's time to go. Nowadays, however,
the economy being what it is, some young adults
may have even graduated from college and, jobless
after fifty interviews, have been forced either
to move back with their folks or continue to live
as they always have. Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell)
and Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) are stuck with
a similar but different story. Entering their
fifth decade of life, they are both slackers who
have been employed at minimum-wage jobs off and
on and think nothing of remaining in the only
homes they've known. Though their parents are
mature, stable people—Brennan's mom, Nancy
(Mary Steenbuirgen) is some sort of executive
and Dale's dad, Robert (Richard Jenkins) is a
doctor—the arrangement has hardly been onerous
for any of the four. Sparks fly, however, when
Robert and Nancy marry, both setting up lives
within Robert's domicile. While stepchildren have
always been caricatured as kids who are hostile
to adults they consider interlopers, the situation
is slightly different in this case. The two adult
children are like are like oil and water: they
not only do not mix but actually hate each other,
particularly when Dale has to share his small
room with a total stranger.

This is the sort
of story that runs through the sitcom formula:
the battling stepbrothers eventually learning
how much they have in common, the Hallmark syndrome
taking effect as sentiment trumps comedy toward
the conclusion. Step Brothers depends
on the talents of Will Ferrell, part of the small
circle of comic stars whose very appearance on
the screen evokes laughter—and John C. Reilly,
whose most engaging performance was in the role
of Dewey Cox in last year's Walk Hard,
which spoofs rock music while showing how a singer
overcomes adversity to become a star.

Director Adam McKay
notwithstanding, Step Brothers has all
the markings of producer Judd Apatow's imagination,
in much the way that a movie directed by Ridley
Scott like Black Hawk Down shows the
impact of producer Jerry Bruckheimer. With enough
vulgarity in the form of bathroom humor and sexual
situations to give this film an "R"
rating (while the over-the-top sadism of The
Dark Knight could not provoke the MPAA into
anything but a PG-13), Step Brothers
relies on physical humor at the expense of wit.
But that's OK. The problem is that some of the
setups are just plain embarrassing. An audience
cannot be blamed for feeling that it's laughing
at the goings-on of autistic children who happen
to be thirty-nine and forty years of age. By contrast,
Judd Apatow's productions of Walk Hard: the
Dewey Cox Story, Knocked Up, and
Superbad may be populated by animal-house
characters but they have us laughing WITH them.
Where those three films seem tightly scripted,
Step Brothers relies too much on hit-or-miss
improvisation.

One scene that's
all too short has the brothers looking for work
after their respective parents lay down the law.
They go as a team in tuxedos while seeking a job
cleaning bathrooms. One interviewer (a cameo from
Seth Rogen, who would have been a welcome addition
as a fleshed-out side character) congratulates
the duo in the monkey suits for "irony."
But for most of the one hundred minutes of screen
time, the character to watch is Richard Jenkins,
whose stunning accomplishment anchoring The
Visitor should have forever cast him out
of his typical jobs as strictly side-show. As
his understanding and acceptance of his boy's
immaturity turn to rage and to an ultimatum he
should have utilized fifteen years earlier, he
trumps both Reilly and Ferrell in the comic department.
Step Brothers is not a step up for either
of the two prinicpals. Ferrell was at his peak
in 2003 as Buddy in Jon Favreau's far wittier
Elf. This film is passable: just slightly
more amusing than Semi Pro and Talladega
Nights.

Brennan Huff (Will
Ferrell) and Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) are
middle-aged layabouts who never quite got around
to moving out of their parents' homes.

They've kept busy
watching television, masturbating, playing drums
and doing all of the things that, as far as I'm
concerned, transform a normal weekend into a great
one.

Their simple worlds
are about to be rocked however, because Brennan's
mom (Mary Steenburgen looking a little on the
tan side) and Dale's dad (Richard Jenkins) have
fallen in love. The couple's resultant marriage
makes step-brothers (and instant adversaries)
of the film's stars.

Of course, the
premise is irrelevant; the main function of the
plot is to reunite Mr. Ferrell with his Talladega
Nights co-star, Mr. Reilly (and writer /
director Adam McKay) and just see what happens.
Subtlety, as always, is not the trio's strong
suit.

The measure by
which you will judge this film entertaining is
a simple one; if you can watch any Will Ferrell
performance with a straight face, this is probably
not your fare of choice. However if the opposite
is true, then you will find yourself laughing
(not hard but) often as both characters find creative
ways to articulate and demonstrate their loathing
for one another.

To reveal more
of the plot would serve only to diminish its humor.

There isn't much
here to think too deeply about and if you're the
stickler who likes to point out that a movie scenario
"would never happen", you may be more
aggravated than amused.

Be aware though
that the movie is not as family-friendly as some
of the trailers (and the demographic in my theater)
might insinuate.

Takashi Miike'sSukiyaki Western Django
Opens Friday, August 29, 2008
Landmark Sunshine Ciname in New York

If foreign filmmakers
are going to attempt to reinvent American cultural
traditions, we could do a lot worse than to have
ourselves reimagined by the Japanese.

In the 1960's,
it was Italian directors that famously made films
which told the story of American cowboys, gunslingers,
cops and robbers – the so-called "spaghetti
westerns." Sergio Leone's Fistful of
Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly were visions of America as a land of
quick-draw contests and blood feuds, populated
with outlaws and bandits ready to jump into the
fray at a moment's notice.

Sergio Corbucci's
Django was a seminal spaghetti western
that inspired scores of imitators and devotees
in America and abroad, and several of today's
most prominent auteurs still reference the film
in their current work. It features a scene where
a character's ear is cut off, a graphic scene
which Quentin Tarantino lovingly cribbed in Reservoir
Dogs, and the main character carries a machine
gun in a coffin, a feature that Roert Rodriguez
adapted for El Mariachi. Django
has become a cult classic among cineastes, and
Japanese director Takashi Miike has sought to
create his own adaptation of the film in Sukiyaki
Western Django.

Set in a fictionalized
version of the Old West, this "sukiyaki western"
tells the story of an enigmatic lone gunman who
drifts into a desert town ripped apart by the
violence of two warring clans, each of whom seek
a legendary buried treasure. The story is loosely
based on Corbucci's film, but Miike sets his during
the Genpei clan wars of the 12th century. The
setting is at once distinctly American and distinctly
Japanese, both modern and ancient, blending both
cultures into a curious juxtaposition. Tumbleweeds
blow past abandoned Shinto temples, the rival
gangs hang out in saloons, drinking firewater
in front of scrims painted with cherry blossoms,
and the town whore wears a kimono over her garter
belt. It's inextricably tied to the stories of
the Old West, but the film also transcends any
particular time and place, taking on the aura
of a time-honored fable.

Miike shot the
film in English, an important and meaningful choice.
Specifically, it's American English, full of colloquialisms
and idioms that sound strangely foreign when spoken
by a Japanese actor. The violence is also distinctly
American. The characters duke it out with revolvers
and a Gatlin gun, although Miike's sense of the
purpose of such violence is never lost. Each bullet
and each blow are deliberate and choreographed;
an unexpected interpretation of the randomness
of gun battles. Surprisingly, the gore so prevalent
in his films Audition and Ichi the
Killer is absent from this film.

As much as Sukiyaki
Western Django is a new hybrid species of
film, it is also a product of Miike's influences
from the spaghetti westerns of the 1960's. Film
buffs will recognize shots that reference classics
such as Once Upon a Time In the West,
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and
A Fistful of Dollars. Miike wears his
influences with pride, and his blatant cribbing
is an homage to his heroes, not just artless mimicry.
Even filmgoers unfamiliar with westerns will recognize
iconic sequences such as the hero jumping onto
a running horse from a second story window, and
the machine gun carried in a coffin; a device
that has also been copied by Robert Rodriguez
in El Mariachi.

Sukiyaki Western
Django is imaginative and compelling, but
it's not without its flaws. Despite the inspired
choice to shoot the film in English, many of the
actors struggle with the dialogue. Although the
plot is not terribly complicated, the varying
degrees of proficiency demand close attention
from the viewer. It is fairly obvious that the
actors have little sense of the words they're
speaking, and demonstrate feeble understanding
of American axioms such as "a day late and
a dollar short." Actress Kaori Momoi steals
scenes as a gun-toting grandmother with a hidden
past, but her back story, told in flashbacks,
seems not only hastily cobbled together, but ultimately
out of place. Her character, Ruriko, is one of
the most entertaining of the film, yet she would
be more at home in a 70's B-movie.

Fans of Westerns
and modern Japanese cinema will find much in Sukiyaki
Western Django to get excited about. The
small in-jokes delivered in the dialogue, the
camera work, and in a cameo by Quentin Tarantino
will satisfy knowing filmgoers. Although the film
is enjoyable on its own merits, Miike is really
seeking an audience that understands his many
homages and reverential touches. Its success,
though, lies in the incredible visual artistry
of the production and its pedigree as a wildly
inventive adaptation of a classic by one of cinema's
modern masters. Miike's "sukiyaki western"
is a fascinating reinterpretation of an old standby,
and a beautiful, violent, and mournful ride.

At first sight
this movie looks like a reinvention of Garson
Kanin's 1939 film The Great Man Votes,
in which Gregory Vance, a widower with two children,
is a former scholar who has turned from book-to-bottle.
He works as a night-watchman and his children,
who know him for what he is and what he isn't,
are his only admirers. Then, it is discovered
that he is the only registered voter in a key
precinct, leading politicians from both parties
to arrive in droves bearing inducements. What
he does about this situation, and the relatives
who want to take his children away from him, make
up the story.

Then again, the
film's inspiration may have come from the Shirley
Temple vehicle, Little Miss Marker, about
a bookie played by Adolphe Menjou and a New York
gambling colony that Ms. Temple's character reforms—or,
more recently, Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich's
1973 film starring real-life father-daughter couple
Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal in the Depression-set
1930s, featuring a foul-talking nine-year-old
with no moral scruples who bails out her dad several
times.

Swing Vote,
however, does not come up in quality to any of
these past offerings. While it provides a breakout
performance for Madeline Carroll, a twelve-year-old
known principally for roles in TV episodes and
commercials, its sentimentality is sticky and
its principal performer, Kevin Costner, is for
almost all of the movie's two-hour time one-note,
unsympathetic, a fellow so self-absorbed (or,
rather, absorbed in his compulsive beer-swilling)
that he does not know who is running for President
of the United States. So far as issues are concerned,
he thinks that pro-life means "Sure, isn't
everybody?" Director and co-writer Joshua
Michael Stern displays residents in small-town
Texaco, New Mexico, as caricatures with a particularly
embarrassing portrayal of gays in the most egregiously
cartoonish way.

One wonders how
nine-year-old Molly Johnson (Madeline Carroll)
turned out so self-reliant and smart, yet so dedicated
to her drunken, mostly unemployed father, Bud
Johnson (Kevin Costner). Maybe the thought of
moving in with her emotionally disturbed mother,
Larissa (Mare Winningham) or being sent out to
a foster home leaves her with the unenviable choice.
Ernest "Bud" Johnson plods through the
movie with a three-day growth of stubble and a
can of beer that sometimes looks surgically implanted
in his palm. He drinks and sleeps his way through
election day while his daughter sneaks into the
election booth (which is totally empty except
for one sleeping official), signing her dad's
name on the register. In the midst of casting
her father's vote, however, the electricity is
cut as the polls close, leaving both candidates
in a dead-heat, state-wide. Thinking that Bud
was unlawfully deprived of the ballot, officials
give him ten days to decide which candidate he
favors, after which time he will enter the voting
booth deciding who will be "the Leader of
the Free World."

As you can imagine,
both candidates lobby the guy day after day. The
current President, Republican Andrew Boone (Kelsey
Grammer), and his opponent, Democratic Donald
Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper), find out by hook or
crook what the guy's hobbies are and where he
might stand on issues—as though Bud even
knows what an issue is. When President Boone thinks
that Bud is in favor of gay marriage (not necessarily),
he changes his stance and announces his new, flip-flop
in favor of the policy. Believing (wrongly) that
Bud is anti-choice, the Democratic candidate puts
out a commercial that is the one witty piece in
this humdrum picture, graphically illustrating
his brand-new policy.

As the production
notes state, the film is only secondarily about
politics. In fact, the ways that director Stern
satirizes presidential campaigns—specifically
the tendency of candidates to pander to their
base while reversing course whenever the supporters
seem hesitant—is old-hat. Politicians do
not always come through on their promises (duh!).
The principal thrust of Swing Vote, then
is the parent-child relationship, punctuating
the the little girl's role as caretaker of her
inebriated, ignorant dad, serving as well to allow
his redemption. In the first instance, since each
candidate plays up to Bud's positions, or what
they perceive them to be, what difference would
it make whom he votes for? In the second instance,
Mr. Costner and Ms. Carroll offer the audience
no bon mots to illuminate their personal qualities
in an entertaining way.

The film is populated
with side characters played with no great charm
by Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci as presidential
advisers and Paula Patton as a newscaster who
helps to redeem the central persona.

How far should
an undercover agent go to infiltrate the bad guys?
Ask yourself: if you were working for the FBI,
the CIA, Homeland Security or any U.S. counter-terrorist
group with the aim of discovering the identity
of terrorist cells, would you be prepared to sacrifice
innocent lives in order to avoid blowing your
cover? This is the dilemma facing Samir Horn (Don
Cheadle), born in Sudan and consequently fluent
in Arabic, who served as an American operative
but now appears to have turned traitor. The bad
guys believe he is one of them. They know him
as an expert in explosive weaponry, ordering him
to blow up sites in several countries to show
us in the West that we must remain perpetually
in fear. To the film's credit, the other side
does get to propagate a belief that might make
Americans uncomfortable. "They accuse us
of destroying innocent lives," says one,
"But they have used their weapons to kill
many innocents on our own side."

Don Cheadle, an
actor associated with liberal causes who has done
much to alert Americans to the ongoing genocide
in Darfur, appears to choose his roles carefully.
Note, for example, his presence in such complex
films as Hotel Rwanda and Crash. This
time around, while he anchors a film dealing with
international politics, his vehicle comes across
by writer-director Jeffrey Nachamanoff as conventional
as a TV series. While Traitor seeks to
emulate the intellectual gamesmanship in Syriana,
not even a worthy performance by Mr. Cheadle can
rescue the picture from formulaic movie-making.

Like Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu's magnificent Babel,
Traitor is set in several countries,
with director Nachmanoff blessed with the terrific
camera work of J. Michael Muro whose steadicom
accented such classics as Titanic, Crash,
and L.A. Confidential. The outskirts
of Marrakesh, Morocco as well as the more urban
scenes in Nova Scotia, Washington, Marseilles
and Toronto add luster to the story, one which
never really captures an audience that should
have been on the edge of their seats.

Samir, an expert
with explosives who served as an American special
operative, appears to have gone over to the other
side. When Yemeni forces overpower a terrorist
group, Samir is thrown in jail where he links
up with one of the few other educated prisoners,
Omar (Said Taghmaoui). Since Samir is a U.S. citizen,
FBI operatives Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and Marx
Archer (Neal McDonough) are on his case as Samir
becomes implicated in bombings on Spain's Costa
del Sol and the U.S. consulate in Nice, France.
Having succeeded in these tasks, Samir moves up
the ranks while he is chased by Clayton and Archer
as though they were Victor Hugo's Javert running
after Jean Valjean. While Samir is careful in
meeting only one mysterious American—Carter
(Jeff Daniels)—he becomes the man of the
month in an extensive plot to blow up several
targets in the U.S. simultaneously. How to avoid
this without giving up his cover is the question
that will have the audience guessing.

Among the insights
given to us is one that shows the Islamic fanatics
as an outwardly calm group loyal to one another
to the extent that they would be risk their lives
to free their comrades from prison. Said Taghmaoui
does a credible job as Samir's best friend, willing
in at least one incident to put his own life on
the line to vouch for the man when suspicions
are raised. Guy Pearce also convinces in the role
of an FBI operative who makes Samir's capture
his principal goal, given the way he considers
the man to have betrayed his country. Cheadle
takes the role of a character who is less saintly
than he was as Hotel Rwanda's Paul Rusesabagina,
the man who tries to save everyone in that beleaguered
country, but Traitor lacks the kind of
suspense and emotional pull that an effective
thriller demands.

MGM/ The Weinstein
Company
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-

We all know people
like the ones Woody Allen focuses on in his wonderfully
scenic, exuberantly romantic Vicky Cristina
Barcelona. From my small circle of friends
and former associates, the woman most similar
to one of the leading characters is married to
a rich, successful doctor. She never had a need
to work and raised a couple of kids who turned
out just fine. Yet, she confided in me, there
was another man she thinks she should have married,
a guy more passionate, more imaginative than this
physician, one who did not spend all his time
talking shop (he is an artist of some sort) and
who'd do things on the spur of the moment rather
than meticulously plan vacations and the like
as though he were making suggestions to a worshipping
patient.

This woman I know
shares a common bond with Vicky (Rebecca Hall),
the first third of the title of Woody Allen's
movie. All three are characters: Vicky; Cristina,
who is played by 23-year-old Scarlett Johansson,
and the sensuous city of Barcelona, on Spain's
Eastern seaboard. People are complex—which
is why divorce is so common since you'll always
find some ingredient missing in a marriage—yet
Allen sets up Vicky as the stable one, the woman
about to be married to Doug (Chris Messina), a
successful lawyer who is determined to buy a house
in New York's Westchester County and talks shop,
golf and electronics. Her best friend Cristina
is perpetually unsatisfied, a passionate creature
who is unlikely to last in marriage to anyone.
Both women are beautiful: both go to Barcelona
to unwind and to give Vicky the materials she
needs for her Master's thesis on Catalonian culture.
Neither expects what develops, which is an intense
sexual relationship with Juan Antonio (Javier
Bardem), a strikingly handsome and successful
artist, who believes that "life is short,
dull and full of pain," so why not take pleasure
where it's offered? His come-on to the two women
is anything but indirect as he invites them fly
with him in his private plane to Oviedo for a
weekend of food, wine, sightseeing and making
love.

The adventurous
Cristina does not hesitate. Vicky thinks no way.
Of course they go, they both wind up in Juan Antonio's
bed albeit at different time, and both meet the
Don Juan's tempestuous ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope
Cruz). Juan Antonio force Vicky to reconsider
her upcoming marriage to the bourgeois, stable
lawyer back home by helping her see what her life
will become if she marries Doug. Vicky also notes
the dull but surface stability of her married
friends Mark (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Patricia Clarkson).
Judy is cheating on Mark with a business associate.

By the film's conclusion,
you may wonder which of the two young American
women will have the happier life. My money is
on Vicky. Bourgeois stability may be dull for
the most part—talking with your upscale
friends about whom to hire for your decorator,
whether your 60-inch plasma TV will go better
on the wall or on furniture, and what college
you should put money away for long before your
kids turn eighteen. We watch how Maria Elena comes
close to committing suicide despite her ravishing
good looks and her talent with the piano and photography,
a woman who "can't get no satisfaction."
We wonder what will happen to Juan Antonio when
his two American tourists go home and his ex-wife
winds up in an institution: will he be content
jumping from affair to short relationships until
he no longer projects his youthful charisma?

Expect fine acting
all around. The dependable Scarlett Johansson,
who has appeared in Woody Allen films Match
Point and Scoop, is beautiful almost
beyond words. Allen newcomer, Rebecca Hall , whose
resume includes Christopher Nolan's The Prestige
and Tom Vaughn's Starter for Ten, has
previously been mostly known for her work on the
stage, such as in her father, Peter Hall's, production
of As You Like It and Galileo's Daughter.

Javier Aguirresaroabe's
camerawork is nothing less than a free commercial
for Barcelona tourism, a city that brags not only
of a sparkling business center but also of the
winding, cobble-stone streets that beckon millions
of tourist annually—to say nothing of Gaudi's
church, a leading, unfinished attraction that
is a metaphor for the concept that romance is
romance only until it has been completed. (Another
way of putting this is that romantic poetry would
not exist if every potential writer were completed
and happy with his or her partner.)

On the one hand,
so-called mainstream film-makers are turning out
more complex product with dark humor—like
Dark Knight, which has enough complexity
and mayhem for critics to warn parents not to
take their children. On the other hand, some film-makers
known for their arty output, are taking a chance
at commercialism, e.g. Mike Leigh (Vera Drake,
Secrets and Lies) has just released Happy-Go-Lucky,
a frothy fair without a spoonful of darkness.
Woody Allen's film for the year 2008 is his most
commercial entry in years, meant as a compliment
for this remarkable bit of celluloid. Even the
soundtrack is to die for, featuring some snippets
of Spanish guitar from the repertory of Isaac
Albeniz, and Giulia Tellarini, Maik Alemany, Alejandro
Mazzoni and Jens Neumaier's intriguing, oft-repeated
song, "Barcelona." Mr. Allen, who had
tanked with serious fare like the Ingmar Bergmanesqe
Shadows and Fog and who has failed to
get anything like near-unanimous positive reviews
from the critics, now gives us Vicky Cristina
Barcelona, filmed in Spain's busiest and
most cosmopolitan city. What would Mr. Allen let
us see as a sequel: a movie entitled Juan
Antonio Maria Elena Sevilla, or perhaps Doug
Vicky Bedford Hills?

Woody Allen has helmed
his best film in years; his Vicky Cristina
Barcelona is a gorgeous Valentine to life,
love, youth and the city of Barcelona. The film’s
cinematography (Javier Aguirresarobe) is so breathtaking
that Barcelona’s champagne- infused air
and light seem to radiate from the screen.

The film is also
incredibly sexy; Woody may be seventy-two years
old but he has not forgotten the siren’s
lure and with this film has left the guilt-infused
sexuality of his earlier films to give us an anything-goes
frolic.

The Vicky in the
story is played by English actress Rebecca Hall.
Vicky is an upper middle class American girl who
is engaged to Doug, a wealthy financier played
by Chris Messina. Vicky travels to Barcelona for
the summer to complete her thesis on Catalan Culture
(a telling choice for a supposedly straight young
lady). Vicky invites her best friend, the free-spirited
Cristina (played by Scarlett Johansson) to join
her and to stay with her at the home of some old
family friends – Mark and Judy Nash (played
by Kevin Dunn and Patricia Clarkson).

The die is cast
when they meet painter Juan Antonio (played by
Javier Bardem). The girls eye him at an art gallery
opening and when they later see him at a restaurant,
he propositions both of them in one of the funniest
come-ons I have ever heard.

Juan Antonio wants
the girls to fly away for a weekend in Oviedo
where they will partake in food, wine, sightseeing
and group sex. Vicky is less than impressed, but
Cristina jumps at the chance so off they all go
- the game-for-anything Juan Antonio and Cristina
accompanied by the supposedly more prudish Vicky.

I don’t want
to give away too much of the plot, but everyone
has a good time in Olviedo except for Cristina
who is stricken by a mild case of food poisoning
(it is always best to not drink the water). The
merry three-some then returns to Barcelona where
Vicky continues with her studies and wedding plans
and the now recovered Cristina begins her love
affair with Juan Antonio.

But all is not
well; Vicky is now filled with doubts, questioning
her choice to marry a good, stable (and wealthy
--- Hello!) man. Cristina has barely settled in
with Juan Antonio when his crazy ex-wife, the
painter Maria Elena (played by Penelope Cruz)
comes to live with them while she recovers from
a suicide attempt.

For a while it
seems like the chaos will work. Vicky squashes
her doubts and marries Doug and Cristina decides
that she likes both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena
(the famous kissing scene). But catharsis is needed
and it arrives with a decided bang.

Vicky Cristina
Barcelona is an incredibly funny movie, containing
some of the most hysterical scenes I have ever
seen in a Woody Allen movie. Penelope Cruz is
hilarious; her scenes with Javier Bardem are classic
Woody Allen, right up there with Judy Davis’s
telephone scene in Husbands and Wives.
Bardem and Cruz scenes are so explosive that the
beauteous Scarlett Johansson is reduced to playing
their straight man, a part she does perform
with aplomb.

A lot has been
written about the film’s three well known
stars: Scarlett Johansson; Javier Bardem; and
Penelope Cruz. Not as much has been written about
Rebecca Hall, who is the heart of the film. Hall
is an incredible actress, just as beautiful as
Johansson and Cruz and quietly funny to boot.
She is utterly hysterical in the Juan Antonio
pick-up scene.

Also of note is
Patricia Clarkson; Clarkson does a fine job playing
one of the film’s catalysts. But does Clarkson
ever deliver a bad performance?

And last but not
least, the city of Barcelona has never looked
so beautiful. It will be impossible to watch this
film without becoming mad-for-Gaudi.

Bravo to Woody
Allen for creating his best film in years. Manhattan
is back and it is Barcelona.

The Visitor,
directed by Tom McCarthy, tells the story of a lonely,
discontent, middle-aged widower whose life is transformed
by a weekend trip to New York City. Richard Jenkins
(Six Feet Under and There’s Something
About Mary) plays Walter Vale, a respected
professor, who takes little pleasure in the class
he teaches. He is a familiar character, weighted
by boredom, but disinterested in change. He fumbles
through an awkward piano lesson showing an interest
in music, yet gives up when his performance is less
than stellar. And so, his life, rambles on at the
same, even pace, until he is asked to present a
paper at an economic conference in New York City.
The weekend trip to his apartment (which has for
many months, maybe even years, gone without a visit)
changes his life, along with the lives of others.

Walter Vale begrudgingly
travels to New York City, from his home in Connecticut
to participate in a three day conference at NYU.
When he arrives at the apartment he has owned for
twenty years, he finds Zainab (Danai Gurira) submerged
in his tub. Her screams alert Tarek (Haaz Sleiman),
her boyfriend, who angrily pushes Walter against
the wall. But Tarek and Zainab learn quickly that
they are in fact intruders and the victims of a
real estate scam. As illegal immigrants, Tarek,
a Syrian man and Zainab, from Senegal, have few
options. Softened by their plight Walter asks them
to stay, while they look for another place to live.
Over the next few days, their awkward attempt at
conversation burgeons into a friendship that is
found and forged through music.

Tarek, a talented
drummer, eases Walter into playing the African drum.
Walter’s uptight disposition begins to unravel,
revealing a man willing to learn new things, a man
eager to play in drum circles and visit jazz clubs.
What starts off as a film focused on the possibility
of unlikely friendships, morphs into another, when
Tarek is arrested for a trivial, imagined, offense.
Tarek is held in a detention center in Queens with
several hundred other illegal immigrants.

And this is where
McCarthy stumbles. Walter devotes himself to helping
Tarek regain his freedom and from it, forms yet
another “unexpected” relationship with
Tarek’s mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass). While
they grieve Tarek’s tumultuous situation,
they find comfort in one another. The scenario is
believeable (anything is believable if done in the
right way) but it doesn’t translate through
Mouna, Walter, and Tarek. McCarthy is overeager
in his attempt to transform these characters and
to make a statement from their disastrous predicament.
He falters in character development. Yes, I understand
that bonds can be made quickly, but I didn’t
believe theirs. So Tarek and Walter play in a drum
circle and share a meal. But I don’t believe
Walter’s reasons for doing it. And then McCarthy
falters further with Mouna. Okay, mother comes to
rescue her child and forms a friendship with the
man who is helping him to regain his freedom. But
a romantic connection—really?

After Tarek’s
incarceration The Visitor’s core
begins to crumble. If you’re going to build
a film on the unlikely relationships of its characters,
you have to make the viewers believe in the possibility
of them. And I didn’t. The characters themselves
need to be rich, whether it’s in their indifference,
passion, monotony. McCarthy made a bold attempt
with The Visitor, a film with an important
message at its core, but it did little to inspire.

Did you ever go to an ophthalmologist
who does not wear corrective lenses? If not, there's
a good reason. People become interested in professions
because of some personal contact with their accoutrements.
(We won't try to discuss why some enter the field
of proctology.) The same applies to psychiatrists
and psychoanalysts. How do people decide that they
want to go into that field? The likely reason is
that they have emotional problems themselves, have
dug into the causes, seeking other psychoanalysts
to work out their problems while trying to help
others. If there's one shrink who fits that bill
to an extreme, that would be Dr. Squires (Sir Ben
Kingsley), one of the two principals in Jonathan
Levine's The Wackness (which means "the
worst"). As played against type by the great
Sir Ben Kingsley, Jeff Squires does not quite steal
the show, given a magnetic performance by Josh Peck
in the role of a likable high-school graduate whose
problems is that he has not yet sown his wild oats
(this is a family publication, but you know what
we mean). As his shrink—an immature fellow
who takes his payments from Josh in weed, not cash—advises,
"You don't need medication: you need to (fill
in the blank).

The Wackness, which won
the audience award and a standing ovation when it
was presented at a Sundance festival, is the kind
of off-beat, adolescent-angst story similar to Richard
Kelly's Donnie Darko, with Josh Peck substituting
for Jake Gyllenhaal. The difference is that Peck's
character, Luke Shapiro, does not envision bunny
rabbits but lithe women with whom he would like
to end his painful virginity. Such a liberated prize
comes in the form of Dr. Squires' stepdaughter,
Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), who takes an assertive
role in setting up a relationship with Luke, introduces
him to the joys of lovemaking, but is not at her
age interested in forming deep relationships. The
story is set in 1994, its New York pothead community
concerned that Mayor Giuliani is taking away some
of the joys that hip New Yorkers have cherished.
To cover his dope-dealing tracks, Luke zips around
areas like Central Park with a wagon that purportedly
sells ices but which actually holds the ganja he
acquires from Percy (Method Man).

Writer-director Levine introduces
us to a typical cause of teenage angst and its opposite
side, sexual abandon, in looking at the parents
of Stephanie and Luke. Stephanie's dad lights up
a hooka at the end of each session with Luke, while
his wife (Famke Janssen), is fed up with her man's
puerility. On Luke's side, dad (David Wohl) is so
deeply in debt to the disgust of his wife (Talia
Balsam) that eviction from their Upper East Side
digs is on the horizon.

Petra Komer films a New York of
fourteen years ago, even getting in a shot of the
Twin Towers, but for some reason the photography
indoors is unduly dark. This is true not only in
Dr. Squires' office, where low lighting sets an
ambiance, but in the headquarters of the Jamaican-American
dope seller and in the apartment of pothead Eleanor
(Jane Adams). Lighting aside, the soundtrack is
loaded with the tunes of the time, including Nas's
"The World is Yours," Raekwon and Ghostface
Killah's "Heaven and Hell," The Notorious
Mr. B.I.G.'s "The What," and R. Kelly's
"Bump and Grind." The picture is anchored
by a top performance by 22-year-old Josh Peck ("Spun,"
"Mean Creek"), who resembles a young James
Stewart who plays the role as an open-mouthed stoner.
The picture should connect with a youthful, hip
audience today.

Sometimes a shrink
saves his patient's life. Sometimes it's the other
way around.

One of the more celebrated
movies screened at the Tribeca Film Festival is
The Wackness, a term referring to "the
glass half empty."

Set in New York City
in the hot, sticky months of 1994, it is a moving
and witty story of a humorous therapist (Ben Kingsley)
who needs even more help than the patient.

Drugs in a doctor's
office are usually doled out by the psychiatrist,
not a troubled teen. Now meet Luke (Josh Peck),
who pays for doctor visits with the currency of
weed. Luke, a likable 18-year-old from a dysfunctional
family, forms a unique bond with Dr. Squires. Although
their ages could make them father and son, their
friendship resembles more of a brotherhood.

The two males stray
even farther from the typical doctor-patient relationship
as they set out on a quest for sex, drugs and money.
Dealing drugs is Luke's source of income the summer
before college. It's also one way to meet girls.

Union (Mary-Kate
Olsen) is a luminous blonde who hangs out in Central
Park and past-their-prime bars where she can make
fun of "creepy old people." Dr. Squires
takes a liking to her, for a few minutes at least.
Luke, however, can only think about one girl: Stephanie
(Olivia Thirlby), his first love. She is an 18-year-old
brunette who speaks in the language of slang and
smokes cigarettes while her family fights. Yelling
parents is a steady backdrop in both their lives,
but Stephanie and Luke escape their problems one
chemistry-filled weekend on Fire Island.

The plot builds as a coming-of-age, character-driven
picture that captures the spirit and the music of
city kids in the '90s. The language of teenagers
weaves into the dialogue, which flows to the beat
of the soundtrack i.e., A Tribe Called Quest, Notorious
B.I.G., Method Man, Raekwon and The Wu-Tang Clan.
The audience is brought back to '94 as the characters
talk about Mayor Giuliani cracking down on crime
in New York. It was a time of pagers, before cell
phones and laptops became ubiquitous, and a time
when M.D.s still hesitated before prescribing medication
for depression. In fact, Luke has to beg and plead
and finally says, "Just give me the happy pills."
Although he never gets his hands on legal drugs,
he has plenty of the other kind, and he shares it
all with Dr. Squires, who takes enough over-the-counter
pills for both of them. These kind of character
flaws elicited laughs from the audience.

The theme of youth
emanates around the innocence of Luke. Despite his
drug dealing, he is just like any other kid trying
to figure out life and love.

After the film, the
audience is left with the image on the movie's poster:
Luke walking around with marijuana tucked away in
its hiding place as he and Dr. Squires wheel around
an ice cart. As the movie's tagline reads, "Sometimes
it's right to do the wrong things."

Written and directed
by Jonathan Levine, The Wackness is the
winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2008 Audience
Award (Dramatic). Its nomination for the Sundance
Grand Jury Prize shows that this film could be more
than a cult hit. Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics,
The Wackness comes out in cinemas July
3, 2008.

An action film starring Scottish
thesp James McAvoy (so amazing in Atonement)
and a sinewy, heavily tatto’d Angelia Jolie,
based on comic books and directed by a Russian.
Hmmm. For me, that’s not exactly a draw. I
will admit I have a built in problem with the action/adventure
genre, or I should say, what it’s become:
a cartoonish, ultra-violent, sense-bombardment computer
game! I do admire the two leads, though, so I had
a few miniscule hopes…

Well, I am shocked and delighted
to report, Wanted (crappy title notwithstanding)--along
with Iron Man--is the most exciting, insanely-entertaining
film of the summer so far. The flick grabs a hold
of you from the get go and never lets go, not for
a millisecond.

This is the U.S. debut of celebrated
Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch,
Day Watch) who is comfortable enough with the
genre that he appropriates from some of the best
American films (I’ll let you decide what you’ve
seen before), while imploding and exploding it at
his whim—but always to great filmic effect.
Bullets slow down; back up through the body they’ve
already penetrated, and zoom back to where they
were first fired. Our protagonist is beaten to near
death, only to find himself in a rejuvenation tub,
fully healed in a few hours. But the dazzling effects
are just the icing on a wild cakeride.

The basic plot surrounds Wesley
Gibson (McAvoy) who is stuck in a dead-end job,
has a cheating girlfriend, a betrayer best friend
and a general sucky life. That is until Fox (Jolie)
and her gang of assassins explodes their way into
his life and takes it over. The group, led by Sloane
(Morgan Freeman, having a blast), are members of
a thousand year old gang known as the Fraternity
and Gibson’s absent father was a member. He
has just been killed and his son is being initiated…initially
against his will.

Smartly scripted by Michael Brandt,
Derek Haas and Chris Morgan, Wanted has
the requisite non-stop action, pulse-pounding thrill
sequences and stunning chases (in particular, a
dazzler scene involving Jolie shooting up a storm
while upside down over the front end of a car),
but the film also puts forth some fascinating and
thought-provoking ideas involving trust, faith,
loyalty and the nature of courage. Imagine: actual
ideas in an action film?!

In some of the more harrowing
sequences, Wesley is brutalized as part of his indoctrination.
The moments seem never-ending. I don’t recall
a film protagonist suffering so onscreen in such
a sadistic manner. Not since Fight Club,
anyway.

McAvoy is a revelation, so appealing
yet so believable once he’s become an assassin
himself. Is there anything this young actor cannot
do? Jolie speaks less than Clint Eastwood in one
of his spaghetti westerns, but is a potent presence.
And there’s nothing cooler than watching her
handle firepower! Her Fox is Mrs. Smith after a
few too many lifefucks.

Wanted boasts terrifically
eye-popping visuals as well as extraordinary camerawork
by Mitchell Amundsen. Danny Elfman’s score
is appropriately bombastic. And the film soars,
in large part, thanks to the editing wizardry of
David Brenner (an Oliver Stone man!)

Wesley’s narration crackles
and moves the film along nicely. Near the beginning
he ponders why his father vanished when he was an
infant, spewing the following in the third person:
“I wonder if his father looked into his baby
blues and thought, Did I just father the most insignificant
asshole of the Twentieth Century?” It’s
self-deprecating, hilarious lines like that that
separate Wesley from most of the cocky and annoying
protags out there and make us really want to follow
him around for two hours.